Fixing Landscape: A Techno-Poetic History of China’s Three Gorges

4. For a full translation of the Commentary’s Three Gorges passage, see Richard E. Strassberg, Inscribed Landscapes: Travel Writing from Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 84–90. Later readers treated Li Daoyuan as the first writer to describe the Gorges based on personal observation, though he clearly relied heavily on earlier accounts. The textual history of the Commentary is complicated by Li’s tendency to borrow from earlier texts without citation. Wang Liqun 王立群 has argued that the passage that contains the “three cries” folk song was based on the earlier Jingzhou ji 荊州記, by the Liu Song Dynasty (420–479) scholar Zhao Shenghong 昭盛弘 (dates unknown), who was in turn deeply influenced by Yuan Shansong’s 袁山松 (d. 401) Yidu shanchuan ji 宜都山川記. Wang Liqun, Zhongguo gudai shanshui youji yanjiu 中國古代山水游記研究 (Kaifeng: Henan daxue chubanshe, 2008), 41–56. For a summary of uncertainties surrounding the Commentary, see Michael Nylan, “Wandering in the Land of Ruins: The Shuijing zhu 水經注 (Water Classic Commentary) Revisited,” in Interpretation and Literature in Early Medieval China, ed. Alan K. C. Chan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), 63–102.

5. Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016), 17.

6. Stoler, Duress, 19.

7. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

8. For more on Derrida’s concept of iterability, see Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 307–330. For a discursive interpretation of tradition, see Talal Asad, “Thinking About Tradition, Religion, and Politics in Egypt Today,” Critical Inquiry 42, no. 1 (2015): 166–214.

9. The most vocal opponent of the dam in China was the activist Dai Qing 戴晴. Two of her edited volumes have been translated into English: The River Dragon Has Come: The Three Gorges Dam and the Fate of China’s Yangtze and Its People, trans. Yi Ming (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1998), and Yangtze! Yangtze!, trans. Nancy Liu (Toronto: Earthscan Canada, 1994). Many popular books were published in the lead-up to completion of the dam. The most sophisticated of these is Deirdre Chetham’s Before the Deluge: The Vanishing World of the Yangtze’s Three Gorges (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).

10. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011), 7.

11. Nixon, Slow Violence, 4.

12. The sixteenth-century Sanxia tongzhi 三峽通志 (Comprehensive Gazetteer of the Three Gorges) opens with a short section that lists competing geographical descriptions of which gorges comprise the Three Gorges. Wu Shouzhong 吳守忠, Sanxia tongzhi 三峽通志 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2002).

13. Du Fu 杜甫, “The Two Palisades of Qutang 瞿塘兩崖,” Dushi xiangzhu 杜詩詳注, ed. Qiu Zhao’ao 仇兆鰲 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2004), 1557, abbreviated hereafter as DSXZ. Though all translations of Du Fu are my own, I provide corresponding page numbers for Stephen Owen’s translation of The Poetry of Du Fu (Boston: De Gruyter, 2015) for reference (abbreviated as Owen, followed by book and poem number: Owen 18.9).

14. Qiu Zhao’ao (1638–1717) suggests an interpretation along these lines (DSXZ 1557), which David R. McCraw develops in Du Fu’s Lament from the South (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1992), 52. Owen’s interpretation (18.9) is similar to Qiu’s and McCraw’s.

15. “On Ascending Baidicheng, First Poem 上白帝城二首, 其一” (DSXZ 1273; Owen 15.8). The second line could also be translated, “With each step and each turn back, it appears anew.”

16. A number of common words for nonpictorial “landscapes” or “scenery” in modern Mandarin also incorporate the word jing 景 (scene/view/vista).

17. Michael Sullivan, Chinese Landscape Painting in the Sui and T’ang Dynasties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); James Cahill, Three Alternative Histories of Chinese Painting (Lawrence: University of Kansas, Spencer Museum of Art, 1988), chap. 2. Landscape poetry (shanshui shi 山水詩) is generally understood to have developed much earlier than landscape painting. For more on the popularization of the term shanshui and the relationship between geographical and aesthetic terminology in the landscape poetry of Xie Lingyun, see Yü-yü Cheng, “Bodily Movement and Geographic Categories: Xie Lingyun’s ‘Rhapsody on Mountain Dwelling’ and the Jin-Song Discourse on Mountains and Rivers,” American Journal of Semiotics 23 (2007): 193–219.

18. Ping Foong, The Efficacious Landscape: On the Authorities of Painting at the Northern Song Court (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2015), Introduction.

19. Chang Tan, “Landscape Without Nature: Ecological Reflections in Contemporary Chinese Art,” Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 3, no. 3 (2016), 225; Foong, The Efficacious Landscape, 17.

20. Analects, trans. D. C. Lau (New York: Penguin Classics, 1979), 6.23; Lunyu zhengyi 論語正義, ed. Liu Baonan 劉寶楠 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1990), 237.

21. For more on the history of the modern term ziran 自然, see Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity—China, 1900–1937 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 326, and Tan, “Landscape Without Nature,” 224–226. For efforts to translate the natural sciences, see Benjamin Elman, On Their Own Terms: Science in China, 1550–1900 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005).

22. Martin Powers, “When Is a Landscape Like a Body?,” in Landscape, Culture, and Power in Chinese Society, ed. Wen-hsin Yeh (Berkeley, Calif.: Institute of East Asian Studies, 1998); Foong, The Efficacious Landscape; Lothar Ledderose, “The Earthly Paradise: Religious Elements in Chinese Landscape Art,” in Theories of the Arts in China, ed. Susan Bush and Christian Murck (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983), 165–183. For the influence of religion on the development of poetic landscape representation, see Xiaofei Tian, “From the Eastern Jin Through the Early Tang (317–649),” in The Cambridge History of Chinese Literature, ed. Kang-i Sun Chang and Stephen Owen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 199–285, and Visionary Journeys: Travel Writings from Early Medieval and Nineteenth-Century China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2011).

23. Paul Kroll, “Lexical Landscapes and Textual Mountains in the High T’ang,” T’oung Pao 84 (1998): 62–101; Stephen Owen, “The Librarian in Exile: Xie Lingyun’s Bookish Landscapes,” Early Medieval China 10–11, no. 1 (2004): 203–226.

24. Paula Varsano, “Do You See What I See?: Visuality and the Formation of the Chinese Landscape,” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 35 (2013): 31–57.

25. Scholars writing on cultural sites, particularly sacred mountains, have focused more carefully on how religious and literary ideas shape space. See especially James Robson, Power of Place: The Religious Landscape of the Southern Sacred Peak (Nanyue) in Medieval China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2009); Wen-shing Chou, Mount Wutai: Visions of a Sacred Buddhist Mountain in Qing China (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2018); and Robert E. Harrist, Landscape of Words: Stone Inscriptions from Early and Medieval China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008). Scholars of Chinese gardens have also been attentive to how landscape ideas are expressed materially; see, for example, Craig Clunas, Garden Culture in Ming Dynasty China (London: Reaktion Books, 1996).

26. For theories of experiential or vernacular landscapes, see John Brinckerhoff Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984) (among other works), and Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). For a work of environmental history that resonates with Jackson’s idea of the vernacular landscape, see Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995).

27. W. J. T. Mitchell, ed., Landscape and Power, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 1. James Elkins and Rachel DeLue, eds., Landscape Theory (London: Routledge, 2008) revisits many of the key theoretical debates in landscape studies. See also Elkins’s reflections on “unsolved problems” raised by this volume, “Report on the Book Landscape Theory,” https://www.academia.edu/163424/On_the_Book_Landscape_Theory_English_?auto=download.

28. Jeremey W. Crampton and Stuart Elden, eds., Space, Knowledge and Power: Foucault and Geography (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2007); Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (New York: Verso, 1989); Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). For an adaptation of the “trilectical” methods of Lefebvre and Soja to the context of Chinese spatial and environmental history, see Ling Zhang, The River, the Plain, and the State: An Environmental Drama in Northern Song China, 1048–1128 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 7, and throughout. Another important approach to landscape is phenomenological, as in Edward Casey’s studies of place and space. For a work that combines the political insights of Mitchell’s work with Casey’s phenomenological approach, see Jeff Malpas, The Place of Landscape: Concepts, Contexts, Studies (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2014). For a popular example of landscape as object of historical memory work, see Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Knopf, 1995). The scholarly literature on landscape is voluminous, varied, and scattered among different fields. For a survey of scholarly literature on European and American landscape traditions, see the “Bibliographic Essay” in Malcolm Andrew’s Landscape and Western Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 236–242.

29. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 2008); Mitchell, Landscape and Power; Denis E. Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998). The list of scholars who have subjected landscape and geography to similar critiques is long. See especially Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History (New York: Knopf, 1988), and Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1994). I am also building on research on imperialism and technologies of representation in China, including James Hevia, The Imperial Security State: British Colonial Knowledge and Empire-Building in Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Andrew Jones, “Portable Monuments: Architectural Photography and the ‘Forms’ of Empire in Modern China,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 18, no. 3 (2010): 599–631; Liu, Translingual Practice and Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004). See also Tani Barlow, ed., Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997).

30. Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Interventions in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 7–8. See also Eric Hayot, The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernity, and Chinese Pain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 10.

31. Shellen Xiao Wu makes a similar argument about coal and the development of a “discourse on energy” in late Qing and early Republican China in Empires of Coal: Fueling China’s Entry in the Modern World Order (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2015), 194.

32. It is the search for natural resources as part of economic and infrastructural development in particular that distinguishes contemporary China’s extractionist imperialism from the territorial imperialism of the Qing, which was, of course, one of the most successful empires in history. For more on Qing imperialism, see Magnus Fiskejö, “The Legacy of the Chinese Empires: Beyond ‘the West and the Rest,’ ” Education About Asia 22, no. 1 (2017): 6–10; Pamela Kyle Crossley, Helen F. Siu, and Donald S. Sutton, eds., Empire at the Margins: Culture, Ethnicity, and Frontier in Early Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Emma Jinhua Teng, Taiwan’s Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures, 1683–1895 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004); Laura Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise: Ethnography and Cartography in Early Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); and the International History Review 20, no. 2 (1998), a special issue on “Manchu Colonialism,” especially Peter C. Perdue, “Boundaries, Maps, and Movement: Chinese, Russian, and Mongolian Empires in Early Modern Central Eurasia,” International History Review 20, no. 2 (1998): 263–286, and Michael Adas, “Imperialism and Colonialism in Comparative Perspective,” International History Review 20, no. 2 (1998): 371–388.

33. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999).

34. Stoler, Duress, 26.

35. Cosgrove, Social Formation, 13.

36. Shijing 245 (Shengmin 生民), Maoshi zhengyi 毛詩正義 (juan 17, 260), in Ruan Yuan 阮元, ed., Shisan jing zhushu 十三經注疏 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1979), 1:528. This poem uses an archaic word for footprint, wu 武, rather than ji. This translation is by Arthur Waley; The Book of Songs, trans. Arthur Waley (New York: Grove Press, 1996), 244.

37. For more on the myth of Cang Jie, see Imre Galambos, “The Chinese Writing System,” in The Oxford Handbook of Classical Chinese Literature (1000 BCE–900 CE), ed. Wiebke Denecke, Wai-yee Li, and Xiaofei Tian (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), chap. 3.

38. Guo Jingchun 郭景純 (276–324 CE), Jiang Fu 江賦, in Wenxuan 文選, compiled by Xiao Tong 蕭統 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1986), 557–579. For a full translation of Guo’s poem, see David R. Knechtges, Wen Xuan or Selections of Refined Literature, vol. 2 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987), 321–352.

39. Paul Carter, Dark Writing: Geography, Performance, Design (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009), 6.

40. Carter, Dark Writing, 6.

41. My use of the trace is based in Chinese aesthetic thought, though it is unavoidably shaped by Derrida’s theories of language and writing. In Derridean thought, the trace/track is one of the primary figures of différance, the mechanism through which the linguistic sign signifies in relation to that from which it differs, which is necessarily both present and absent. A “mark of the absence of a presence,” the trace is a figure of the present that is equally related to the past (against whose absence and difference it signifies) and the future (which it makes possible as a point of departure). Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), xvii. In triangulating ji/trace with landscape and shanshui, I am also working against a tendency to romanticize the trace and its “haunting” qualities in order to draw attention to their durable material effects (Stoler, Duress, 5, 6).

42. In the years since the completion of the Three Gorges Dam, Chinese artists have turned to landscape as both an ecocritical form and a means of reflecting on the status of tradition in contemporary China. For more on this phenomenon, see Corey Byrnes, “Chinese Landscapes of Desolation” (forthcoming); Peter Fischer, ed., Shanshui: Poetry Without Sound? Landscape in Chinese Contemporary Art (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2011); Xavier Ortells-Nicolau, “Gray Pastoral: Critical Engagement with Idyllic Nature in Contemporary Photography from China,” Trans Asia Photography Review 5, no. 2 (2015); and Tan, “Landscape Without Nature.”

43. David Harvey, “The Nature of Environment: The Dialectics of Social and Environmental Change,” in The Ways of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 193.

44. Patricia Yaeger, “Editor’s Column: Sea Trash, Dark Pools, and the Tragedy of the Commons,” PMLA 125, no. 3 (2010): 535; Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009); Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 10; Karen Thornber, Ecoambiguity: Environmental Crises and East Asian Literatures (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012); Ursula Heise, Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

45. Yaeger, “Editor’s Column,” 526.

46. Yaeger, “Editor’s Column,” 527.

47. White, The Organic Machine.

48. My conception of the techno-poetic landscape overlaps somewhat with what Richard White describes as “hybrid landscapes,” in “From Wilderness to Hybrid Landscapes: The Cultural Turn in Environmental History,” Historian 66 (September 2004): 557–564.

49. Mao Zedong 毛澤東, “Shuidiao getou, youyong 水調歌頭, 游泳.” For the Chinese text as well as a translation of the entire poem, see Mao Zedong, The Poems of Mao Zedong, trans. Willis Barnstone (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 82–85.

1. James Legge, trans., The Chinese Classics, vol. 3, The Shoo-King (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1960), part 2, 78; Shangshu Zhengyi 尚書正義 (juan 5, 29), in Ruan Yuan 阮元, ed., Shisan jing zhushu 十三經注疏 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1979), vol. 1, 141.

2. Jiang Zemin 江澤民, “Ba sanxia gongcheng jiancheng shijie yiliu gongcheng 把三峽工程建成世界一流工程,” in Jiang Zemin wenxuan 江澤民文選, vol. 2, http://cpc.people.com.cn/GB/64184/64185/180138/10818621.html.

3. Wu Hung, A Story of Ruins: Presence and Absence in Chinese Art and Visual Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012), 64.

4. Wu, A Story of Ruins, 64.

5. For a history of modern inscriptional technologies, see Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999).

6. Richard von Glahn, The Country of Streams and Grottoes: Expansion, Settlement, and the Civilizing of the Sichuan Frontier in Song Times (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, Council on East Asian Studies, 1987), 16.

7. von Glahn, The Country, 12–16.

8. “Singing My Feelings on Traces of the Past, Second Poem 詠懷古跡, 其二” (DSXZ 1499; Owen 17.34). Du Fu refers to the non-Han people of this region as “Man 蠻 [tribes],” “hundred Man” (baiman 百蠻), “southern Man” (nanman 南蠻), or “black Man” (wuman 烏蠻), all catchall phrases for southern tribes. For a description of the ethnic makeup of the region during the early Song, see von Glahn, The Country, chap. 1, and throughout.

9. Su Shi 蘇軾, “Wang Dingguo shiji xu 王定國詩集序,” in Du Fu juan 杜甫卷, ed. the Huawen xuan 華文軒 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1964), 99; cited and translated by Eva Shan Chou in Reconsidering Tu Fu: Literary Greatness and Cultural Context (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 23.

10. Chou, Reconsidering Tu Fu, 27. For more on Du Fu’s importance during the Song, see Charles Hartman, “The Tang Poet Du Fu and the Song Dynasty Literati,” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 30 (2008): 43–74.

11. For detailed information on Du Fu’s movements during his lifetime, see Chen Yixin 陳貽焮, Du Fu pingzhuan 杜甫評傳 (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 2003); William Hung, Tu Fu, China’s Greatest Poet (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952); Li Chunping 李春坪, Du Fu nianpu xinbian 杜甫年譜新編 (Taibei: Xinan shuju, 1975); Liu Mengkang 劉孟伉, Du Fu nianpu 杜甫年譜 (Hong Kong: Huaxia chubanshe, 1967); David R. McCraw, Du Fu’s Lament from the South (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1992). For a collection of the best-known premodern writings on Du Fu, see the three-volume Du Fu juan.

12. Xuanzong left Chang’an with his “precious consort” (guifei 貴妃), Yang Yuhuan 楊玉環 (719–756), though the latter, blamed for distracting the emperor from his duties, was executed at a post station between Chang’an and Chengdu. For a classic account of the rebellion, see Edwin G. Pulleyblank, The Background to the Rebellion of An Lu-shan (London: Oxford University Press, 1955).

13. Du Fu’s reasons for leaving Chengdu are not totally clear. For some theories, see McCraw, Du Fu’s Lament, 39–40.

14. “Reflected Light 返照” (DSXZ 1336; Owen 15.57).

15. Though the Yangzi was an important transportation route, most trade during this period was conducted over the land routes that connected the Chengdu Basin and Chang’an. Upper Yangzi ports remained relative economic and cultural backwaters well into the Southern Song (von Glahn, The Country, 198, 214). Shipping on the upper Yangzi was still carried out on a small scale through the Ming Dynasty. The size of ships and volume of cargo transported downriver and upriver increased dramatically during the Qing (due in part to population growth). Nanny Kim, “River Control, Merchant Philanthropy, and Environmental Change in Nineteenth-Century China,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 52, no. 4 (2009): 667.

16. For a structuralist reading of the “Autumn Stirrings,” see Yu-Kung Kao and Tsu-Lin Mei, “Tu Fu’s ‘Autumn Meditations’: An Exercise in Linguistic Criticism,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 28 (1968): 44–80. For a book-length exegesis, see Ye Jiaying 葉嘉瑩, Du Fu qiuxing bashou jishuo 杜甫秋興八首集說 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1988). See also McCraw, Du Fu’s Lament, chap. 11.

17. DSXZ 1485; Owen 17.27.

18. This line is built around a common Tang poetic reference that combines two separate tales. The first records an historical expedition taken by Zhang Qian 張騫 (d. 114 BCE), who was imprisoned by the Xiongnu while searching for the origins of the Yellow River. The second tells the story of a man who lived along a coast by which a mysterious raft passed every year during the eighth month. One year he decided to climb aboard, and after a lengthy trip he reached a strange city, where he found a weaving girl and a cowherd. When he asked them where he was, the boy sent him in search of a resident of the state of Chu, who explained that the man had hitched a ride on the “traveler star,” which passes through the Milky Way and the Cowherd constellation at the same time every year. Du Fu’s line refers to both Zhang Qian, who was a prisoner in a foreign land, and the man who traveled on an empty star-raft.

19. The “painted ministry” refers to a government building in Han Dynasty Chang’an in which portraits of meritorious officials were displayed. Du Fu superimposes Tang sites and institutions on their Han equivalents throughout the “Autumn Stirrings.”

20. For a similar image of connected waterways, see “Yearning for my Home on the Brocade River, Two Poems 懷錦水居止二首” (DSXZ 1237; Owen 14.74).

21. Stephen Owen, “Synecdoche of the Imaginary,” in The Rhetoric of Hiddenness in Traditional Chinese Culture, ed. Paula Varsano (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016), 261.

22. Owen, “Synecdoche,” 264.

23. For a study of the gibbon in Chinese literature, see Robert van Gulik, The Gibbon in China: An Essay in Chinese Animal Lore (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1967).

24. Du Fu makes a similar observation in his “Ballad of the Most Skilled 最能行” (DSXZ 1286; Owen 15.19): “ ‘At dawn depart from Baidi, by dusk arrive in Jiangling 朝发白帝暮江陵’/Just recently I witnessed this feat—truly there is proof 顷来目击信有征!” Stephen Owen describes a comparable gesture in Xie Lingyun’s 謝靈運 work in “The Librarian in Exile: Xie Lingyun’s Bookish Landscapes,” Early Medieval China 10–11, no. 1 (2004): 206.

25. Paula Varsano, Tracking the Banished Immortal (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i, 2003), 9, and throughout. For more on xu/shi, see Stephen Owen, Readings in Chinese Literary Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, Council on East Asian Studies, 1992), 590. For a summary of approaches to xu/shi as used in the so-called Li-Du debate, see Varsano, Tracking, 4–12, and throughout.

26. Varsano, Tracking, 12, and throughout.

27. The possibility of returning home haunts Du Fu’s late poetry. For examples, see “On Hearing That the Armies Had Recovered Henan and Hebei 聞官軍收河南河北” (DSXZ 968; Owen 11.68), from 763, and “Dreams of Returning Home 夢歸” (DSXZ 1950; Owen 22.33), from 769.

28. Paula Varsano, “Lowered Curtain in the Half-Light: An Introduction,” in The Rhetoric of Hiddenness, 1.

29. The “Great Preface” to the Book of Odes is the most important statement of literary principles and poetic modes in the premodern Chinese literary tradition. For a line-by-line translation and exegesis alongside the Chinese text, see Owen, Readings, 37–56.

30. Owen, Readings, 46.

31. McCraw renders xing as “moods” (Du Fu’s Lament) while Kao and Mei opt for “meditations” (“Tu Fu’s ‘Autumn Meditations’”). I have followed Owen in translating the title as “Autumn Stirrings.”

32. Yu appears in a range of early sources, many of which are translated in Anne Birrell’s Chinese Mythology: An Introduction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). The earliest sources are the Shangshu 尚書 and the Shijing 詩經. The latter contains at least six references to Yu, in poems 201, 244, 261, 300, 304, and 305. The former is the most important early source for Chinese flood myths related to Yu and his father Gun. The “Tribute of Yu” (Yu gong 禹貢) chapter contains the most thorough account of his feats. There are also lengthy accounts of Yu’s deeds in the Guoyu 國語 and Mencius. For more, see Mark Edward Lewis, The Flood Myths of Early China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 163n28, 164n30, and throughout.

33. In 1995, a lavish, officially sponsored ceremony—the first since 1934—was held at what is known as Yu the Great’s tomb in Shaoxing, Zhejiang. Michael Leibold reads this revival of a cult of Yu as part of a mid-1990s attempt to articulate a neo-Confucian philosophy that drew on “Chinese” traditions to reinforce centralized power; see his “Da Yu, a Modern Hero? Myth and Mythology in the People’s Republic of China,” in Perceptions of Antiquity in Chinese Civilization, ed. Dieter Kuhn and Helga Stahl (Heidelberg, Germany: Edition Forum, 2008), 361–375. Recent archaeological surveys carried out in China have been represented as verifying aspects of the mythology of Yu as flood queller; see Nicholas Wade, “Scientific Evidence of Flood May Give Credence to Legend of China’s First Dynasty,” New York Times, August 4, 2016.

34. Gun tried to stop the flood by building dams and dykes. After he was executed, Yu emerged fully formed from his corpse. Faced with the same floods, Yu reversed his father’s work, digging out the land and guiding the water into rivers that drained into the sea.

35. Robin McNeal, “Constructing Myth in Modern China,” Journal of Asian Studies 71, no. 3 (2012): 690. I have drawn on this article for its detailed description of the park and its statuary. Professor McNeal has also been kind enough to allow me to reproduce two of the excellent images that he took of the park. For more of his images, see https://www.flickr.com/photos/robin_mcneal/albums/72157636433625894/with/10209018693/.

36. McNeal, “Constructing Myth,” 679.

37. McNeal, “Constructing Myth,” 699.

38. “Correspondence: A Memorial to Captain Plant,” North China Herald, April 2, 1921.

39. Formations such as the Yanyu Rock 灎澦堆, an enormous boulder located directly in front of Kuimen, were integral to both the popular culture of those who navigated the river and the poets who traveled through the gorges, including Du Fu. Yanyu was dynamited in 1958 on Mao’s suggestion. Deirdre Chetham, Before the Deluge: The Vanishing World of the Yangtze’s Three Gorges (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 157.

40. Lyman P. Van Slyke, Yangtze: Nature, History, and the River (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1988), 38–39.

41. For the Chinese text of “Swimming” and an alternate translation, see Mao Zedong, The Poems of Mao Zedong, trans. Willis Barnstone (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 82–85.

42. Judith Shapiro, Mao’s War Against Nature: Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

43. DSXZ 1225; Owen 14.60.

44. Yu is credited with having driven away snakes and serpents from the land (Lewis, Flood Myths, 53). For a version of this aspect of his myth, see Mengzi zhushu jiejing 孟子注疏解經, “Teng wengong xia 滕文公下” (juan 6, 50) in Shisan jing, 2714.

45. DSXZ (1225) gives a variant of sheng 生 (rise from) for xu 噓 (exhale, puff).

46. In the course of Yu’s work, he used four vehicles (sizai 四載): a boat (zhou 舟), a chariot (che 車) for traveling overland, a sledge (chun 輴) for traversing muddy areas, and a sedan chair (lei 樏) for crossing mountains. Shangshu Zhengyi (juan 5, 29), in Shisan jing, 141.

47. “The three Ba” is a Han administrative reorganization of the ancient state of Ba, which included the Gorges. For an early source on the history and geography of Ba, see Chang Ju 常璩 (ca. 291–361), Huayang guozhi 華陽國志, ed. Ren Naiqiang 任乃強 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1987).

48. For other temple poems, see “Zhuge’s Shrine 諸葛廟” (DSXZ 1674; Owen 19.27) and poem four of “Singing My Feelings on Traces of the Past 詠懷古跡” series (DSXZ 1505; Owen 17.37).

49. von Glahn, The Country, 13.

50. See the collected comments that follow the poem in DSXZ (1225).

51. For alternative readings, see McCraw, Du Fu’s Lament, 182–183, and Yu-Kung Kao and Tsu-Lin Mei, “Meaning, Metaphor, and Allusion in T’ang Poetry,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 38 (1978): 331–332.

52. DSXZ 1558; Owen 18.10.

53. In both the DSXZ and Du Fu 杜甫, Dushi jingquan 杜詩鏡銓, ed. Yang Lun 楊倫 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1980), “At Qutang Contemplating the Past” follows immediately after “The Two Palisades of Qutang.” Qiu argues that they were written in that order (DSXZ 1558).

54. The image of the “Potter’s Wheel” (taojun 陶鈞) as generative force comes from the second chapter of the Zhuangzi 莊子. See William Callahan, “Cook Ding’s Life on the Whetstone: Contingency, Action, and Inertia in the Zhuangzi,” in Wandering at Ease in the Zhuangzi, ed. Roger T. Ames (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 184–186.

55. Du Fu may have a poem by Shen Quanqi 沈佺期 (ca. 650–714) in mind here. In the opening couplet of his “Passing by the Dragon Gate of Shu 過蜀龍門,” Shen proclaims: “The Dragon Gate was not carved out by Yu 龍門非禹鑿/its weirdness is the work of Heaven 詭怪乃天功.” Shen Quanqi 沈佺期 and Song Zhiwen 宋之問, Shen Quanqi Song Zhiwen ji jiaozhu 沈佺期宋之問集校注 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2001), 200.

56. For more on huaigu poetry, see David R. Knechtges, “Ruin and Remembrance in Classical Chinese Literature: The ‘Fu on the Ruined City’ by Bao Zhao,” in Reading Medieval Chinese Poetry: Text, Context, and Culture, ed. Paul Kroll (Boston: Brill, 2015), 55–89; Stephen Owen, Remembrances: The Experience of the Past in Classical Chinese Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), chap. 1; Hans Frankel, “The Contemplation of the Past in T’ang Poetry,” in Perspectives on the T’ang, ed. Arthur Wright and Dennis Twitchett (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1973), 345–365; and Wu, A Story of Ruins, 64.

57. This translation is by James Legge, The Chinese Classics, vol. 5, The Ch’un Ts’ew with the Tso Chuen (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1960), part 2, 578. For the original, see Chunqiu zuozhuan zhengyi 春秋左傳正義 (juan 41, 319), in Shisan jing, 2021.

58. Water control, centralized political administration, and moral philosophy were closely linked in early accounts of Yu’s dredging. Lewis, Flood Myths, 32–33.

59. The “gait of Yu” is also the name of a performance form that was used “in many rituals to protect travelers, cure diseases, and perform other functions” (Lewis, Flood Myths, 103). According to Wolfram Eberhard, shamans in the state of Ba performed a one-legged dance that was known as the “Yu step” (Yu bu 禹步). Wolfram Eberhard, The Local Cultures of South and East China (Leiden: Brill, 1968), 74. For more on attributes of Yu’s body, see: Lewis, Flood Myths, 190n87, and throughout.

60. Mark Edward Lewis, The Construction of Space in Early China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 2–3.

61. Stephen Owen, “The Self’s Perfect Mirror: Poetry as Autobiography,” in The Vitality of the Lyric Voice, ed. Shuen-fu Lin and Stephen Owen (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), 92.

62. DSXZ 1228; Owen 1463.

63. By the Tang, it was common to refer to the visibility of Yu’s traces on the mountains and cliffs of the Gorges. For examples, see Chen Zi’ang’s 陳子昂 (d. 702) “At Baidicheng Contemplating the Past 白帝城懷古,” Chen Zi’ang ji 陳子昂集 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1960), 17, and Meng Haoran’s 孟浩然 (ca. 689–740) “Entering the Gorges, Sent to My Younger Brother 入峽寄弟,” Meng Haoran shiji jianzhu 孟浩然詩集箋注 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2000), 136.

64. The first of the “Singing My Feelings” poems centers on the poet Yu Xin 庾信 (513–581); the third on Wang Zhaojun 王昭君, a royal consort who was married off to a Xiongnu leader during the Han; the fourth on Liu Bei 劉備 (161–223), scion of the royal house of the Han; and the fifth on Liu Bei’s military strategist, Zhuge Liang 諸葛亮 (181–234). For readings of the entire series, see McCraw, Du Fu’s Lament, 186–195, and Hans Frankel, The Flowering Plum and the Palace Lady (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976), 118–124.

65. For an extensive bibliography of studies on Song Yu, see David R. Knechtges and Taiping Chang, eds., Ancient and Early Medieval Chinese Literature: A Reference Guide (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2014), 1007–1022.

66. von Glahn, The Country, 13–14. For more on the secularization of goddesses during the Tang Dynasty, see Edward H. Schafer, The Divine Woman: Dragon Ladies and Rain Maidens in T’ang Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). For a translation of the Songs of Chu, see David Hawkes, trans., The Songs of the South (New York: Penguin Classics, 2011).

67. DSXZ 1501; Owen 17.35.

68. Song Kaiyu 宋開玉, Dushi shidi 杜詩釋地 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2004), 394. In a poem titled “Song Yu’s House 宋玉宅,” Fan Chengda 范成大 (1126–1193) explains that, “according to tradition, the county offices of Zigui are [built] on the old remains of [Song Yu’s house]. In a wine shop to the left of the office some frivolous type [haoshizhe 好事者] has put up a sign saying ‘Song Yu’s Eastern House.’” Fan Shihu ji 范石湖集 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1981), 272.

69. Owen treats Song Yu as the one who produces wenzao: “His former house by the river and mountains, nothing but his literary flourishes” (17.35). Song Yu was a master of the fu (rhapsody), a form that was sometimes criticized for its fanciful scenarios and emphasis on virtuosic displays of arcane linguistic knowledge. What the “baselessness” of Song Yu’s own writing has to do with his house in this interpretation is not totally clear.

70. Jian Jinsong 簡錦松 believes that both the Yang Terrace and the Palaces of Chu were located within the immediate environs of Kuizhou. Du Fu Kuizhou shi xiandi yanjiu 杜甫夔州詩現地研究 (Taibei: Taiwan xuesheng shuju, 1999), chap. 2.

71. In a long poem titled “Mt Wu 巫山,” the famous Song Dynasty poet Su Shi recounts a conversation with an old man who in his youth repeatedly climbed to the top of Mt. Wu, where he found inscribed steles and other traces of the goddess and her cult. Su Shi 蘇軾, Su Shi shiji 蘇軾詩集 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1982), 33.

72. See Song, Dushi shidi, 395–396, for more detailed information. Yang terraces may originally have been associated with shamanistic rituals, though the record appears to be silent on such matters.

73. Du Fu uses the phrase yaoluo 搖落 in a number of his poems, including, “Western Tower, First Poem 西閣二首, 其一” (DSXZ 1473; Owen 17.15). This is how it appears in the “Nine Disputations” (jiubian 九辯): “Doleful, ah, this autumn air! 悲哉秋之為氣/Sere, severe, ah! The grasses and trees wither and decay 蕭瑟兮草木摇落而變衰.” Chuci buzhu 楚辭補注, comp. Hong Xingzu 洪興祖 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1983), 182; Hawkes, The Songs of the South, 209.

74. These adjectives come from Yu Xin’s “Rhapsody on a Barren Tree Kushu fu 枯樹賦,” Yu Zishan jizhu 庾子山集注, ed. Ni Fan 倪璠 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2000), 46. Yu Xin is a figure of special significance for Du Fu. Descended from a northern family that fled south at the fall of the Western Jin Dynasty (265–316), he was technically a northerner born in exile, though he considered himself a native of the Yangzi city of Jiangling. He reached lofty political and literary heights toward the end of the Liang Dynasty (502–557). When that dynasty began to implode, he was sent north to sue for peace. From 554 to the end of his life he was held as a captive of northern dynasties. For more, see William T. Graham, Jr., “The Lament for the South”: Yu Hsin’s “Ai Chiang-Nan Fu” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 4–20.

75. Yu Xin, Yu Zishan jizhu, 94.

76. Chuci buzhu, 215; Hawkes, The Songs of the South, 230.

1. Paul Carter, Dark Writing: Geography, Performance, Design (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009), 91.

2. Ruth Mostern, “Dividing the Realm in Order to Govern”—The Spatial Organization of the Song State (960–1276 CE) (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2011), 99.

3. Eva Shan Chou, Reconsidering Tu Fu: Literary Greatness and Cultural Context (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 26; Deborah Marie Rudolph, “Literary Innovation and Aesthetic Tradition in Travel Writing of the Southern Sung: A Study of Fan Ch’eng-ta’s ‘Wu ch’uan lu’ ” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1996), 56–57.

4. Stephen Allee has done extensive research on The Shu River, attributed to Li Gonglin 李公麟 (ca. 1041–1106), and the Ten Thousand Li Along the Yangzi River (Changjiang wanli tu 長江萬里圖), attributed to Juran 巨然 (active ca. 960–985). For documents that transcribe, date, and translate (nonpoetic) inscriptions, identify collectors’ seals, and list labels, see https://archive.asia.si.edu/SongYuan/F1916.539/F1916-539.Documentation.pdf (The Shu River) and https://archive.asia.si.edu/songyuan/F1911.168/F1911-168.Documentation.pdf (Ten Thousand Li). See also Julia Orell, “Picturing the Yangzi River in Southern Song China (1127–1279)” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2011).

5. Qianlong’s poem is collected in Zhang Zhao 張照 et al., comp., Shiqu baoji 石渠寶笈 (Haikou: Hainan chubanshe, 2001), vol. 2, 1201–1202, and Qianlong, Yuzhishi chuji 御製詩初集, 32:11b–13a, in Qing Gaozong (Qianlong) yuzhi shiwen quanji 清高宗(乾隆)御製詩文全集 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2010), vol. 1, 823–824.

6. Mostern, Dividing the Realm, 84.

7. Peter K. Bol, “The Rise of Local History: History, Geography, and Culture in Southern Song and Yuan Wuzhou,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 61, no. 1 (2001): 56.

8. James M. Hargett, “Local Gazetteers and Their Place in the History of Difangzhi Writing,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 56, no. 2 (1996): 408.

9. Wu Hung, A Story of Ruins: Presence and Absence in Chinese Art and Visual Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012), 70.

10. Wu, A Story of Ruins, 86.

11. Wu, A Story of Ruins, 86.

12. For geographical and phenomenological approaches to place, see Yi-fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), and Edward Casey, Getting Back Into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993).

13. Jian Jinsong 簡錦松, Du Fu Kuizhou shi xiandi yanjiu 杜甫夔州詩現地研究 (Taibei: Taiwan xuesheng shuju, 1999); Tan Wenxing 譚文興, “Dongtun, Rangxi ji qita—du Du Fu Kuizhou shi xiandi yanjiu 東屯, 瀼西及其他—讀《杜甫夔州詩現地研究》,” Du Fu yanjiu xuekan 杜甫研究學刊 66, no. 4 (2000): 252.

14. For a sample of xiandi research on Du Fu, see the bibliography to Jian’s Du Fu Kuizhou shi. See also Song Kaiyu 宋開玉’s Dushi shidi 杜詩釋地 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2004), which has entries for every place name mentioned in Du Fu’s poetry as well as a final chapter of forty-five pages dedicated to sites of Du Fu worship throughout China.

15. Tan, “Dongtun,” 252.

16. Xiandi research is deeply invested in the “realism” of Du Fu’s poetry. Du Fu’s status as a supposedly “realist poet” (xianshi zhuyi shiren 現實主義詩人) has led some scholars to treat his poetry more as a meticulous geographical and social record than as a form of creative expression. See, for example, Ren Guiyuan 任桂園, “Gu Kuizhou diwang xingsheng yu Tangshi huzheng (shang) 古夔州地望形勝與唐詩互証,” Chongqing sanxia xueyuan xuebao 重慶三峽學院學報 25, no. 115 (2009): 6. For more on Du Fu’s realism, see Chou, Reconsidering Tu Fu, 75–106.

17. Stephen Owen, “The Librarian in Exile: Xie Lingyun’s Bookish Landscapes,” Early Medieval China 10–11, no. 1 (2004): 203–226.

18. Carter, Dark Writing, 91.

19. Carter, Dark Writing, 84.

20. Ding Guanpeng’s image is reminiscent of the landscapes of Ma Yuan 馬遠 (active ca. 1190–1225), who is closely associated with diagonally composed paintings anchored in “one corner” (yijiao 一角). See Richard Edwards, The Heart of Ma Yuan: The Search for a Southern Song Aesthetic (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011).

21. Zhu Mu 祝穆 and Zhu Zhu 祝洙, Songben fangyu shenglan 宋本方輿勝覽 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1986); Wu Qian 吳潛, Zhengde Kuizhou fuzhi 正德夔州府志, in Zhongguo xinan wenxian congshu, Xinan xijian fangzhi wenxian 中國西南文獻叢書, 西南稀見方志文獻, vol. 9 (Lanzhou: Lanzhou daxue chubanshe, 2003).

22. Most gazetteers provide only basic information about the location of Du Fu’s homes while citing earlier scholarly sources and listing poems written there. There are a number of sources on the origins and evolution of the Song gazetteer, including Hargett, “Local Gazetteers”; Bol, “The Rise of Local History”; Jeffrey Moser, “One Land of Many Places: The Integration of Local Culture in Southern Song Geographies,” Journal of Song-Yuan Studies 42 (2012): 235–278; and Mostern, Dividing the Realm. These authors place the development of difangzhi in the context of waning state power, decreased official interest in mapping projects at the end of the Northern Song, and the rise of local elite culture. For later developments in gazetteer production, see Benjamin Elman, “Geographical Research in the Ming-Ch’ing Period,” Monumenta Serica 35 (1981–1983): 1–18, and Yongtao Du, “Literati Spatial Order: A Preliminary Study of Comprehensive Gazetteers in the Late Ming,” Ming Studies 66 (2012): 16–43.

23. Fan Chengda 范成大, Wuchuan lu 吳船錄, in Fan Chengda biji liuzhong 范成大筆記六種, ed. Kong Fanli 孔凡禮 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2002), 217 (hereafter FCDBJ). For a translation, see James M. Hargett, Riding the River Home: A Complete and Annotated Translation of Fan Chengda’s (1126–1193) Diary of a Boat Trip to Wu (Wuchuan lu) (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2008).

24. For more on Chinese travel writing in the Song, see Cheng Minsheng 程民生, Songdai diyu wenhua 宋代地域文化 (Kaifeng: Henan daxue chubanshe, 1997); Ronald Egan, “When There Is a Parallel Text in Prose: Reading Lu You’s 1170 Yangzi River Journey in Poetry and Prose,” in Reading Medieval Chinese Poetry: Text, Context, and Culture, ed. Paul Kroll (Boston: Brill, 2015), 221–250; James Hargett’s translations of Fan Chengda’s travel diaries (see bibliography); Wang Fuxin 王福鑫, Songdai lüyou yanjiu 宋代旅遊研究 (Baoding: Heibei daxue chubanshe, 2007); and Cong Ellen Zhang, Transformative Journeys: Travel and Culture in Song China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2011). There are also two unpublished theses on Song travel writing: Beryl Chapman, “Travel Diaries of the Southern Sung Dynasty with Particular Reference to Fan Chengda’s Wuchuan lu” (master’s thesis, University of Sydney, 1985), and Rudolph, “Literary Innovation.” See also Richard E. Strassberg, Inscribed Landscapes: Travel Writing from Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), Introduction.

25. The term youji 遊記 refers here not to long-length travel diaries such as Fan Chengda’s, but to short essays that detail the experience of traveling to and visiting specific sites of historical or cultural interest. This form of spatial writing emerged in the mid to late Tang and early Song, with Liu Zongyuan’s 柳宗元 (773–819) “Eight Accounts of Yongzhou” (Yongzhou baji 永州八記), frequently listed as one of the first mature travel essays. Liu Zongyuan ji 柳宗元集 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1979), 762–773. For more on the development of youji, see James M. Hargett, On the Road in Twelfth Century China: The Travel Diaries of Fan Chengda (1126–1193) (Stuttgart, Germany: Franz Steiner, 1989), 17–25. For information on anthologies of travel writing, see Strassberg, Inscribed Landscapes, Introduction, and throughout. On the specific lyrical qualities of Liu’s famous works and the Tang essay in general, see Rudolph, “Literary Innovation,” 6–7.

26. Lu You 陸游, Weinan wenji 渭南文集, in Lu You quanji jiaozhu 陸游全集校注, ed. Qian Zhonglian 錢仲聯 (Hangzhou: Zhejiang jiaoyu chubanshe, 2011), juan 17, 100. Lu You’s Dongtun essay is also collected in DSXZ (2251). For a complete translation of Lu You’s Dontun essay, see Corey Byrnes, “Rising From a Placid Lake: The Three Gorges at the Intersection of History, Aesthetics and Politics” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2013), chap. 2.

27. The Rangxi lofty retreat seems to have been reconstructed sometime after the twelfth century. DSXZ (2253) includes an essay by the Ming official Chen Wenzhu 陳文燭 (jinshi 1565) titled “A Record of the Reconstruction of the Rangxi Thatched Hut 重修瀼西草堂記.”

28. Xie 𤈱 can also be pronounced che. It seems to be a more common version of the characters 烲 and 𤈴, the latter of which is used to write Yu’s name in Quan Shu yiwenzhi 全蜀藝文志, ed. Yang Shen 楊慎 (1488–1559) (Beijing: Xianzhuang shuju, 2003) (hereafter QSYWZ).

29. Yu Xie 于𤈱, “Account of the Renovation of Du Fu’s Former Residence at Dongtun in Kuizhou 修夔州東屯少陵故居記,” QSYWZ 1206.

30. Song, Dushi shidi, 653.

31. “Two Chuan” (liangchuan 兩川) refers to eastern and western Sichuan. Huang Tingjian 黃庭堅, Yuzhang Huang wenji 豫章黃文集, in Sibu congkan 四部叢刊 (Taibei: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1975), juan 17, 22b–23b (hereafter YZHWJ). In 2015, the government of Danleng, Sichuan, opened a new Hall of the Great Odes containing inscriptions of Du Fu’s Sichuan poetry in the style of Huang Tingjian’s calligraphy.

32. YZHWJ 22b–23b. For more on Huang’s essay, see David Palumbo-Liu, The Poetics of Appropriation: The Literary Theory and Practice of Huang Tingjian (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993), 34–36.

33. Thorny bushes and similar ground cover are common in poetry on ruins. For the relationship between ruins and wasteland, see David R. Knechtges, “Ruin and Remembrance in Classical Chinese Literature: The ‘Fu on the Ruined City’ by Bao Zhao,” in Reading Medieval Chinese Poetry: Text, Context, and Culture, ed. Paul Kroll (Boston: Brill, 2015), 65.

34. Wu, A Story of Ruins, 26; See also Knechtges, “Ruin and Remembrance,” 56.

35. Wu, A Story of Ruins, 26.

36. Analects 11.15; Lunyu zhengyi 論語正義, ed. Liu Baonan 劉寶楠 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1990), 453. For a translation of this passage, see the Analects, trans. D. C. Lau (New York: Penguin Classics, 1979), 108.

38. By contrast, local governments in other spots made famous by Du Fu’s post-rebellion residence, including Tonggu 同谷 (in modern Gansu Province) and Chengdu, both of which had their own thatched huts, had sponsored the maintenance of his former homes.

40. Su Shi 蘇軾, “Wang Dingguo shiji xu 王定國詩集序,” in Du Fu juan 杜甫卷, ed. the Huawen xuan 華文軒 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1964), 99. Cited and translated in Chou, Reconsidering Tu Fu, 23.

43. Ironically, it was often “celebrated ‘visitors/outsiders’” like Du Fu who contributed most to the fame of cultural sites. Zhang, Transformative Journeys, 179.

44. “Singing My Feelings on Traces of the Past, Second Poem 詠懷古跡, 其二” (DSXZ 1499; Owen 17.34).

45. Carter, Dark Writing, 84.

46. For more on “cultural pilgrimages” during the Song, see Zhang, Transformative Journeys, chap. 7, and throughout.

47. Strassberg frames Song travel writing as a manifestation of gewu (Inscribed Landscapes, 46). For more on gewu, see Benjamin Elman, On Their Own Terms: Science in China, 1550–1900 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 4–6, 441n3, and throughout; Andrew Plaks, trans., Ta Hsüeh and Chung Yung (The Highest Order of Cultivation and On the Practice of the Mean) (New York: Penguin Books, 2003); and Hoyt Tillman, “The Idea and the Reality of the ‘Thing’ During the Song: Philosophical Attitudes Towards Wu,” Bulletin of Song and Yüan Studies 14 (1978): 68–82.

48. Jian, Du Fu, 237–244.

49. Bill Porter, Finding Them Gone: Visiting China’s Poets of the Past (Port Townsend, Wash.: Copper Canyon Press, 2016), 162.

50. Porter, Finding Them Gone, 163.

51. Porter, Finding Them Gone, 167.

52. Porter, Finding Them Gone, 166.

53. Du Fu’s Kuizhou poetry draws primarily on works attributed to Song Yu in the Chuci anthology, including the “Nine Disputations” and “Summoning the Soul,” rather than on his rhapsodies. For examples of Du Fu’s use of language attributed to Song Yu, see chapter 1.

54. There is little to indicate that Song Yu’s Mt. Wu is the Mt. Wu of the Three Gorges. For foundational research on the goddess of Mt. Wu, with a special focus on the geography of Song Yu’s poems, see Wen Yiduo 聞一多, “Gaotang shennü chuanshuozhi fenxi 高堂神女傳說之分析,” in Qinghua daxue xuebao 清華大學學報 10, no. 4 (1935): 837–866.

55. Song Yu 宋玉, “Gaotang fu 高唐賦,” in Wenxuan 文選, compiled by Xiao Tong 蕭統 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1986), 587. For a complete translation of the “Gaotang Rhapsody,” see David R. Knechtges, Wen Xuan or Selections of Refined Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2014), vol. 3, 325–339. For a bibliography of studies on the rhapsody as well as a list of translations, see David R. Knechtges and Taiping Chang, eds., Ancient and Early Medieval Chinese Literature Part Two: A Reference Guide (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2014), 1019–1021.

56. The goddess of Mt. Wu, or, as Edward H. Schafer renders her name, the “Divine Woman of Shamanka Mountain,” was “[probably] an ancient fertility goddess whose ritual mating with a shaman-king was necessary to the well-being of the land”; Schafer, The Divine Woman: Dragon Ladies and Rain Maidens in T’ang Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 46. For an account of the textual permutations of the goddess of Mt. Wu, see Wen, “Gaotang shennü,” 837–865. By the time she appeared in Song Yu’s rhapsody, the goddess had already begun to undergo a process of secularization that obscured her origins in local cults. In this she shared the fate of the many zoomorphic deities, including “dragon ladies and rain maidens,” who resided in numinous locales throughout the south. Richard von Glahn, The Country of Streams and Grottoes: Expansion, Settlement, and the Civilizing of the Sichuan Frontier in Song Times (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, Council on East Asian Studies, 1987), 13–14; Schafer, The Divine Woman.

57. Paul F. Rouzer, Articulated Ladies: Gender and the Male Community in Early Chinese Texts (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001), 58–59.

58. For more on goddess poetry in the Tang, see Schafer, The Divine Woman. For an account of how early erotic poetry, including rhapsodies, shaped later discourses on love and desire, see Wai-yee Li, Enchantment and Disenchantment: Love and Illusion in Chinese Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), chap. 1. For connections between Song Yu’s two “goddess” rhapsodies and early erotic literature, see Rouzer, Articulated Ladies, 58–72.

59. Liu Gang 劉剛, “Songren guanyu Wushan shennüde bianwu yuqi dui Song Yu shennü miaoxiede piping 宋人關於巫山神女的辯誣與其對宋玉神女描寫的批評,” in Anshan shifan xueyuan xuebao 鞍山師範學院學報 12, no. 3 (2010), 23.

60. Du’s Record is collected in the sixty-volume edition of the Daozang 道臧 (Taipei, 1977) vol. 30, 24154–24207. For a partial translation (not including the entry on Yaoji), see Suzanne Cahill, Divine Traces of the Daoist Sisterhood: Records of the Assembled Transcendents of the Fortified Walled City, by Du Guangting (850–933) (Magdalena, N.M.: Three Pines Press, 2006). This passage is quoted verbatim in Li Fang 李昉, comp., Taiping guangji wubaijuan 太平廣記五百卷 (Taipei: Xinxing shuju, 1968), juan 56, 132.

61. Li, Taiping guangji, 132. In one essay on the shrine to the goddess, the Song writer Ma Yongqing 馬永卿 (dates uncertain; lived around the Northern Song/Southern Song transition) praises Du Guangting’s Record and another text for defending the goddess (QSYWZ 1059).

62. Li, Taiping guangji, 132. The relationship between Yu and the goddess of Mt. Wu described in the Yongcheng jixian lu might be distantly connected to shamanistic practice. For more, see Wolfram Eberhard, The Local Cultures of South and East China (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1968), 74.

63. Li Bai, “Moved by Poetic Images, Poem One 感興八首, 其一,” in Li Taibai quanji 李太白全集, ed. Wang Qi 王琦 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2006), 1102 (hereafter LTBQJ). Schafer notes that this poem “departs radically from tradition,” though it is a departure that would become increasingly common (The Divine Woman, 101–102).

64. Yuefu shiji 樂府詩集, compiled by Guo Maoqian 郭茂倩 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2003), 238–243 (hereafter YFSJ). Though an elite form, Music Bureau poetry has roots in folk music, which provided titles and tunes (now lost) for each theme. See Joseph Allen, In the Voice of Others: Chinese Music Bureau Poetry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), and Anne Birrell, Popular Songs and Ballads of Han China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1993).

65. Yu Fen’s 于濆 ninth-century “How High Mt. Wu” poem (YFSJ 240), for example, blames Song Yu for slandering the ancient kings of Chu and making the goddess of Mt. Wu a succubus. This critical tradition seems to have continued into at least the Ming Dynasty. In a poem titled “Mt. Wu” (Wushan 巫山), the travel writer and poet Wang Shixing 王士性 (1547–1598) echoes Yu Fen’s critique of Song Yu. Wang Shixing dilishu sanzhong 王士性地理書三種, ed. Zhou Zhenhe 周振鶴 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chuanshe, 1993), 519.

66. These lines appear near the end of Song Yu’s “Goddess” rhapsody (Shennü fu 神女賦). Wenxuan, 889; Knechtges, Wen Xuan, 349.

67. Fan Chengda, Fan Shihu ji 范石湖集 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1981), 116 (hereafter FSHJ).

68. This line alludes to the story of Lady Li 李夫人, consort of Emperor Wudi of the Han 漢武帝 and a famous femme fatale. The best-known version of her story comes from Ban Gu’s 班固 (32–92) Han shu 漢書, which describes the stunning Lady Li’s dubious rise to favor and her deathbed manipulation of the emperor that led to the political ascent of her immoral brothers. Having refused the emperor a final glance before her death, Lady Li comes to obsess the ruler, inspiring him to seek her through occult practices. When a wizard from the state of Qi promises to conjure her spirit, the emperor is only too eager to follow along. Seeing a woman who resembles Lady Li, Wudi composes a poem in which he asks, “Was it her, or was it not her [shiye feiye 是邪非邪]?” Wudi next composes a rhapsody on Lady Li that draws heavily on the mystical imagery of Song Yu’s goddess rhapsodies and the language of the Songs of Chu. Ban Gu, Han shu 漢書 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1970), vol. 51, 2346. For more on Lady Li, see Stephen Owen, “One Sight: The Han Shu Biography of Lady Li,” in Rhetoric and the Discourses of Power in Court Culture: China, Europe, and Japan, ed. David R. Knechtges and Eugene Vance (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005), 239–259.

73. See Li Bai’s “Observing Yuan Danqiu Seated Before a Screen Painting of Mt. Wu 觀元丹丘坐巫山屏風” (LTBQJ 1135).

75. Fan describes commissioning paintings “to take back” (yigui 以歸) with him in two poems from his journey down the Yangzi, “The Tower of Myriad Vistas 萬景樓” (FSHJ 254) and “Upon First Entering the Area of the Great Mt. E 初入大峨” (FSHJ 256).

76. Mao Zedong, “Shuidiao getou, youyong 水調歌頭, 游泳.” For the Chinese text and an alternate translation, see Mao Zedong, The Poems of Mao Zedong, trans. Willis Barnstone (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 82–85.

77. Ban Wang, The Sublime Figure of History: Aesthetics and Politics in Twentieth-Century China (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), 106.

78. Wang, The Sublime Figure of History, 114.

79. Patricia Yaeger, “Editor’s Column: Sea Trash, Dark Pools, and the Tragedy of the Commons,” PMLA 125, no. 3 (2010): 535.

1. From the first preface to Luo Jinshen’s 羅縉紳 Xingchuan biyao 行川必要 (Yichang: Shuishi xinfu zhongying, 1883).

2. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014).

1. Sun Yat-sen 孫中山, “Shang Li Hongzhang shu 上李鸿章书,” in Sun Zhongshan quanji 孫中山全集 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1981), vol. 1, 8.

2. John Savage, Preliminary Report on the Yangtze Gorge Project (Chungking: Government of China, Ministry of Economic Affairs, National Resources Commission, 1944), 6.

3. Eric Hayot, The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernity, and Chinese Pain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 13.

4. Hans van de Ven, Breaking with the Past: The Maritime Customs Service and the Global Origins of Modernity in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 8. For a summary of different approaches to China’s semicolonial status, see Anne Reinhardt, Navigating Semi-Colonialism: Shipping, Sovereignty, and Nation-Building in China, 1860–1937 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2018), 3–7.

5. Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 29, and throughout. For the question of collaboration, see Reinhardt, Navigating Semi-Colonialism, 8–14, and chap. 3.

6. The Treaty of Tianjin (art. X) established Chinkiang as a treaty port. Edward Hertslet, Hertslet’s China Treaties (London: Harrison and Sons, 1908), vol. 1, 22–23.

7. Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995).

8. Shellen Xiao Wu, Empires of Coal: Fueling China’s Entry in the Modern World Order (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2015), 140–142.

9. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 2008), 15.

10. Early foreign visitors to Sichuan noted the friendly natives and the absence of the hated epithet yang guizi 洋鬼子, or “foreign devil”; see, for example, Archibald Little, Through the Yang-tse Gorges: or, Trade and Travel in Western China (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1888), 140–141. For the idea of Sichuan as a Chinese “El Dorado,” see Susan Schoenbauer Thurin, Victorian Travelers and the Opening of China, 1842–1907 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999), 69. For more on the complex subject of Europe’s diminishing esteem for China, see Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), 69–85; Giovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-first Century (New York: Verso, 2008), 58; Nicholas R. Clifford, “A Truthful Impression of the Country”: British and American Travel Writing in China, 1880–1949 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), chap. 2; and Thurin, Victorian Travelers, 5–6.

11. This image is based on a sketch by Blakiston’s travel companion, Alfred Barton; Thomas Wright Blakiston, Five Months on the Yang-tsze; with a Narrative of the Exploration of Its Upper Waters, and Notices of the Present Rebellions in China (London: John Murray, 1862).

12. Blakiston, Five Months, 84.

13. Blakiston, Five Months, 86.

14. Blakiston, Five Months, 177. Blakiston and his associates also collected a small number of ornithological, botanical, and geological specimens to be sent off to the relevant experts in London upon their return (Blakiston, Five Months, 359). Following his Yangzi expedition, Blakiston became a highly respected natural historian. For more, see the entry by H. E. D. Blakiston (revised by Christopher J. Schmitz) in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004), http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/2598.

15. Blakiston, Five Months, 162–163.

16. For more on the history of willowware, see Patricia O’Hara, “The Willow Pattern That We Knew: The Victorian Literature of Blue Willow,” Victorian Studies 36, no. 4 (1993): 421–442.

17. Blakiston, Five Months, 163.

18. James Hevia, The Imperial Security State: British Colonial Knowledge and Empire-Building in Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 14, and chap. 3. Aspects of Blakiston’s narrative resemble the “route books” produced by the military intelligence organs of the British imperial bureaucracy as part of this “information system” (Hevia, Imperial, 73–78).

19. Blakiston, Five Months, 204.

20. Blakiston, Five Months, 205.

21. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 26. See also Hevia, The Imperial Security State, 82–83.

22. Blakiston, Five Months, 178.

23. Hevia, The Imperial Security State, 73, 149. For more on optical consistency and the transportability of maps, see James Hevia, English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century China (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005), 125; James Hevia, “The Archive State and the Fear of Pollution: From the Opium Wars to Fu-Manchu,” Cultural Studies 12, no. 2 (1998): 237–240; Bruno Latour, “Drawing Things Together,” in Representations in Scientific Practice, ed. Michael E. Lynch and Steve Woolgar (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), 19–69; Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993); and Martin Jay and Sumathi Ramaswamy, eds., Empires of Vision: A Reader (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014), 33, 42n27.

24. “Western China: Trade and Travel in the Yang Tse Gorges,” New York Times, May 6, 1899.

25. “Western China.”

26. For more on the Treaty of Tianjin, see Reinhardt, Navigating Semi-Colonialism, 48–51.

27. Hertslet, Hertslet’s China Treaties, vol. 1, 77. The treaty did allow for members of the British government to reside in Chongqing “to watch the conditions of British trade.”

28. Hertslet, Hertslet’s China Treaties, vol. 1, 94, 96.

29. Reinhardt, Navigating Semi-Colonialism, chap. 1 and 5.

30. Little complained that the “Peking authorities will shelter themselves behind the ambiguous clauses of the Treaty, as long as they can”; Little, Through the Yang-tse Gorges, 352–354.

31. Cornell Plant dates this to 1897, though Little’s own account dates it to 1898. See S. Cornell Plant, Handbook for the Guidance of Shipmasters on the Ichang-Chunking Section of the Yangtze River (Shanghai: Statistical Department of the Inspectorate General of Customs, 1920), 1, and Archibald Little, Gleanings from Fifty Years in China (London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co., 1910), 134. For more on Little in Sichuan, see Thurin, Victorian Travelers, chap. 2.

32. Two British military steamships, HMS Woodcock and Woodlark, also made the Yichang to Chongqing trip in 1900. The same year, the German-owned Suihsiang was wrecked just beyond Yichang, delaying the introduction of regular steam travel until 1909, when the Chinese Szechuan Steam Navigation Company introduced the British-built Shutung, also piloted by Plant. Plant, Handbook, 1; “Plant Memorial Inauguration—Monument to Pioneer of Navigation on Upper Yangtze Unveiled by British Consul,” North China Herald, December 6, 1924; “Memorial to Late Captain Plant—Pioneer of Yangtze Navigation Monument on the Hsin T’an and Bursary Fund,” North China Herald, October 4, 1924.

33. Reinhardt, Navigating Semi-Colonialism, 54. Ari Kelman describes a similar process in A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 77.

34. Nanny Kim, “River Control, Merchant Philanthropy, and Environmental Change in Nineteenth-Century China,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 52, no. 4 (2009): 660–694. According to Kim, the “improvement works on the Upper Yangzi go back to the Tang and Song,” though they “increased noticeably in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and greatly so in the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries” (670).

35. Kim, “River Control,” 678, 661n2.

36. Kim, “River Control,” 664. For Mao’s role in this process, see Deirdre Chetham, Before the Deluge: The Vanishing World of the Yangtze’s Three Gorges (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 157.

37. Kim, “River Control,” 679–681.

38. For a survey of Western, Japanese, and Chinese mapping projects from the late Qing and early Republican era, see Li Peng 李鵬, “Wanqing minguo chuanjiang hangdaotu bianhuide lishi kaocha 晚清民國川江航道圖編繪的歷史考察,” in Xueshu yanjiu 學術研究 2 (2015): 96–103.

39. The Maritime Customs was one of the most important sources of government revenue between its founding and the Communist Revolution in 1949. See van de Ven, Breaking with the Past.

40. Plant, Handbook, “Prefatory Note” from 1916 published in the 1920 edition.

41. Plant, Handbook, 2.

42. H. G. W. Woodhead, The Yangtsze and Its Problems (Shanghai: Mercury Press of Shanghai, 1931), 17.

43. Reinhardt, Navigating Semi-Colonialism, chap. 5.

44. Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1994), 16.

45. Luo Jinshen 羅縉紳, Xingchuan biyao 行川必要 (Yichang: Shuishi xinfu zhongying, 1883). Little commends the Xingchuan biyao (Essential Guide) as “well-arranged” and gives a “pidgin English” version of the title as “Walkee Szechuen must want-jee” as well as a grander translation of “Vademecum [sic] of Admiral Ho”; Little, Through the Yang-tse Gorges, 323. Edward Parker provides “an almost literal translation” of the route guide portion of the text and a glossary of “valuable local terms” with English translations; Edward Parker, Up the Yang-tse (Hongkong: China Mail Office, 1891), 21.

46. The textual history of Luo’s Essential Guide and Critical Chart is complex. Early editions seem to have circulated together with the Xiajiang jiushengchuan zhi 峽江救生船志 (Gazetteer of the Lifeboat System of the Yangzi Gorges), a two-volume text, also attributed to Luo, that details the workings of a lifeboat system as well as the names of Chinese and Western donors.

47. Igor Iwo Chabrowski argues that detailed charts of the Upper Yangzi appeared only in the late Qing in response to increased economic activity on the river; Igor Iwo Chabrowski, Singing on the River: Sichuan Boatmen and Their Work Songs, 1880s–1930s (Boston: Brill, 2015), chap. 1, especially 63–72.

48. For more on early charts of the river, see Julia Orell, “Picturing the Yangzi River in Southern Song China (1127–1279)” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2011), 207–210, and Cordell Yee, “Cartography in China,” in The History of Cartography, vol. 2, book 2, Cartography in the Traditional East and Southeast Asian Societies, ed. J. B. Harley and David Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 160–166.

49. Liu Shengyuan 劉聲元, Xiajiang tanxian zhi 峽江灘險志 (Beijing: Heji yinshuaju, 1920).

50. There is confusion over whether this figure’s name is Guo Zhang or Jiang Guozhang 江國璋. I follow Lan Yong’s 藍勇 usage here, as he is one of the few scholars to have carried out extensive research on the topic; Lan Yong, Changjiang sanxia lishi dili 長江三峽歷史地理 (Chengdu: Sichuan renmin chubanshe, 2003), 435–440. Multiple editions of the Critical Chart were published between 1901 and 1926. Most consist of two volumes, each of which centers on a lithographic chart sandwiched between two textual stage guides. The guides list the location of landmarks, give distances between them, and provide navigational information. Combined, the lithographic charts depict the river as it runs from Yichang to Chongqing and back. According to available sources, the chart was first published in 1901 by Shanghai’s Xiuhai shanfang shuju 袖海山房書局, though I have not been able to locate a dated version from before 1916. There are four versions in the collection of the Harvard Yenching Library. The finest, Chuanxing bidu xiajiang tukao 川行必讀峽江圖考, is undated but may be the 1901 edition. There are three dated editions (1916, 1919, and 1926) of a version titled Xingchuan biyao tukao 行川必要圖考 published by the Wensheng shuju 文盛書局.

51. Lan Yong 藍勇, “Qingdai changjiang shangyou jiusheng hongchuanzhi chutan 清代長江上游救生紅船制初探,” Zhongguo shehui jingjishi yanjiu 中國社會經濟史研究 4 (1995): 37–43. For information on other philanthropic programs, see Kim, “River Control.”

52. Yang Baoshan 楊寶珊, comp., Chuanjiang tushuo jicheng 川江圖說集成 (Chongqing: Zhongxi shuju, 1923).

53. The Sichuan Yangzi Steam Navigation Company was founded in 1908 with funds provided by Qing officials, Sichuanese gentry, and merchants in order to maintain Chinese control over commercial steamships on the Upper Yangzi. Reinhardt, Navigating Semi-Colonialism, 185–186.

54. Yang, Chuanjiang tushuo, no page numbers.

55. Li, “Wanqing.”

56. Yee, “Cartography,” 128.

57. Yee, “Cartography,” 128.

58. For an example of Qing topographical painting, woodblock carving, and engraving, see Kangxi Emperor, Yu Shen, and Matteo Ripa, Thirty-six Views: The Kangxi Emperor’s Mountain Estate in Poetry and Prints, trans. Richard E. Strassberg (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2016), and Lin Qing 麟慶 and Wang Chunquan 汪春泉, Hongxue yinyuan tuji 鴻雪因緣圖記 (Beijing: Guojia tushuguan chubanshe, 2011).

59. Laikwan Pang, The Distorting Mirror: Visual Modernity in China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007), 40.

60. Pang, The Distorting Mirror, 40–44.

61. For more on Woodhead, see Robert Bickers, Britain in China: Community, Culture and Colonialism, 1900–1949 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2012), chap. 2.

62. For more on the American-owned Yangtsze Rapid Steamship Co., see Frederick B. Hoyt, “The Open Door Leads to Reluctant Intervention: The Case of the Yangtze Rapid Steamship Company,” Diplomatic History 1, no. 2 (1977): 155–169.

63. The Yangtsze and Its Problems reads as a caricature of orientalist ideas, but its focus on economic and infrastructural issues aligns it with some Chinese travel accounts of the period. According to Madeleine Yue Dong, Chinese accounts of inland and borderland travel from the 1920s and 1930s tended to focus on “the geography of these parts of the country…in terms of industrial capacity, conditions of transportation, and natural resources,” reproducing the strategic survey approach of foreign accounts in the context of national construction; Madeleine Yue Dong, “Shanghai’s China Traveler,” in Everyday Modernity in China, ed. Madeleine Yue Dong and Joshua L. Goldstein (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), 212. The Minsheng Industrial Company (Minsheng shiye gongsi 民生事業公司), which included a Yangzi shipping concern, published numerous articles between 1936 and 1946 on the Three Gorges region in its journal A New World (Xin shijie 新世界). Most of these focus on industrial and commercial development, though the journal also printed scenic photographs and poetry and promoted tourism in the Gorges and other areas of Sichuan. Reinhardt, Navigating Semi-Colonialism, 283, 350n116. Chinese travel accounts of the Three Gorges appear in multiple tourism and lifestyle journals from the 1930s and early 1940s. These typically center on the same famous sites (shengji 勝跡) that Tang and Song travelers sought out. An essay from 1932 is typical: written in a slightly modernized classical Chinese, it is nearly identical in poetic tone and format to premodern travel essays and gazetteer entries in which famous landmarks are described by citing poetry by figures such as Du Fu, Li Bai, and Fan Chengda and geographical texts such as Li Daoyuan’s Commentary to the Classic of Rivers; Zhao Youwen 趙幼文, “Sanxia yiyou 三峽憶游” (A Three Gorges Journey Remembered), Lüxing zazhi 旅行雜誌 6, no. 6 (1932): 9–18. Another essay, from 1939, also cites Li’s Commentary, though it does so shortly after providing a capsule history of Little’s and Plant’s roles in introducing steamships on the Upper Yangzi; Fu Huanguang 傅煥光, “Sanxia ji 三峽記” (Three Gorges Diary), Lüxing zazhi 旅行雜誌 13, no. 2 (1939): 3–6. For additional travel essays from this period, see Wang Xiaoting 王小亭, “Sanxia jiyou 三峽紀遊,” Dazhong huabao 大眾畫報 1 (1933): 16–17; Gao Bochen 高伯琛, “Sanxia daoguan 三峽道觀,” Lüxing zazhi 旅行雜誌 10, no. 1 (1936): 103–112; and Jiang Zhonghai 江仲海, “Sanxia yipie 三峽一瞥,” Xin Zhonghua 新中華 5, no. 6 (1937): 82–89. For more on tourism between the late Qing and early years of the People’s Republic, see Mo Yajun, “Itineraries for a Republic: Tourism and Travel Culture in Modern China, 1866–1954” (PhD diss., University of California, Santa Cruz, 2011).

64. Woodhead, The Yangtsze, 4, 6–7.

65. Woodhead, The Yangtsze, 4.

66. Woodhead, The Yangtsze, 42.

67. Travelers encountered a great deal of writing carved into cliffs or mountainsides. Here is Isabella Bird’s description of a temple near Yunyang in the Gorges: “Nature and art have combined in a perfect picturesqueness. On the flat vertical surface of a noble cliff rising from the boulder-strewn shore of the Yangtze are four characters—and what can be more decorative than Chinese characters ‘writ large’?—which are translated ‘Ethereal bell, one thousand ages.’” Isabella Bird, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond (Boston: Beacon, 1985), 163.

68. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 80. See also Andrea Bachner, Beyond Sinology: Chinese Writing and the Scripts of Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 95, and throughout.

69. Images of penetration have long been a central component of colonial discourse. See David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 19.

70. Worster, Nature’s Economy, 379.

71. For more on “free trade imperialism,” see Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015), 74, 216n4, 216n7.

72. Worster, Nature’s Economy, 379.

73. For a critique of natural history as imperial project, see Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 37.

74. The Qing Dynasty was, of course, a major imperial power with extensive experience in exploiting natural resources from colonized regions such as Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang. What I am discussing here, however, is the embrace by the Qing and later Chinese governments of the modern scientific disciplines and technologies integral to resource imperialism as part of a discourse of national sovereignty. Perhaps the most relevant account of how the Qing and later Chinese governments reconceptualized resources and adopted the “underlying values” of Euro-American resource imperialism is Wu, Empires of Coal, 3. See also Grace Yen Shen, Unearthing the Nation: Modern Geology and Nationalism in Republican China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), and Sakura Christmas, “The Cartographic Steppe: Spaces of Development in Northeast Asia, 1895–1945” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2016).

75. Bird, The Yangtze Valley, 147.

76. Blakiston describes the same phenomenon in Five Months, 139.

77. John Thomson, Illustrations of China and Its People (London: S. Low, Marston, Low, and Searle, 1873), Introduction. Volume 3 of Thomson’s book includes a ten-page account of his journey through the Gorges as well as one of the earliest photographic travelogues of the region.

78. Bird often refers to coal in The Yangtze Valley and Beyond. Archibald Little, who made his livelihood selling mining equipment, provides a lengthy account of a visit to a mining operation outside of Chongqing and comments throughout his narrative on the prospects for mining in Sichuan; Through the Yang-tse Gorges, 273–282. Much of the popular interest in coal can be traced to the writings of the German geologist Ferdinand von Richthofen, who studied China’s geology between 1868 and 1872. See Wu, Empires of Coal, chap. 2, and Shen, Unearthing the Nation, chap. 1.

79. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Basic Writings, trans. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper Collins, 1993), 320.

80. Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 320.

81. Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 326.

1. “Women chuangongde shenghuo zhen beican 我們船工的生活真悲慘” (The life of us boatmen is tragic indeed), in Zhongguo geyao jicheng Chongqingshi juan 中國歌謠集成重慶市卷, ed. Nie Yunyan 聶雲嵐 (Chongqing: Kexue jishu wenxian chubanshe, 1989), 24; Igor Iwo Chabrowski, Singing on the River: Sichuan Boatmen and Their Work Songs, 1880s–1930s (Boston: Brill, 2015), 183.

2. Archibald Little, Gleanings from Fifty Years in China (London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co., 1910), 42.

3. There are a range of Chinese word for trackers, including shuishou 水手, yeshou 曳手, chuanfu 船夫, and qianfu 縴夫. The last two are the most common.

4. Important exceptions include Du Fu’s “Ballad of the Most Skilled 最能行” (DSXZ 1286; Owen 15.19), which celebrates the skill of Yangzi boatmen, and Mi Fu’s 米芾 (1051–1107), “A Poem Written in a Boat on the Wu River 吳江舟中詩,” which describes trackers hauling a boat in windy weather. For a translation of the latter, see Peter Sturman, Mi Fu: Style and the Art of Calligraphy in Northern Song China (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), 115–117. In addition to these relatively rare treatments of tracking, a number of folk songs and sayings attributed to Yangzi boatmen—including the song about crying gibbons cited in Li Daoyuan’s Shuijing zhu—were taken up as conventionalized examples of local culture by literati poets. Boatmen also appear with some regularity in folk-song-inspired “bamboo branch lyrics” (zhuzhi ci 竹枝詞), the most famous of which were composed by the temporary Kuizhou resident Liu Yuxi 劉禹錫 (772–824). Later examples, especially from the Qing, sometimes describe the harsh conditions under which trackers and other boatmen worked, as well as the songs (haozi 號子) that they sang while working; Chabrowski, Singing, 107–113. Perhaps the most famous pictorial representation of river trackers is in Zhang Zeduan’s 張擇端 (fl. twelfth century) Qingming shanghe tu 清明上河圖 (Along the River on the Qingming Festival), in the collection of the Palace Museum, Beijing.

5. Chabrowski, Singing, 63.

6. For examples of Chinese travel writing on the Three Gorges, see chapter 3, note 63.

7. Chinese woodblock artists may have been influenced in their depiction of trackers by Ilya Repin’s (1844–1930) famous painting Barge Haulers on the Volga River (1870–1873), which was reproduced in China at least as early as 1922; Xiaoshuo yuebao 小說月報 13, no. 4 (1922): 7. A 1932 painting of two trackers by the artist Wu Zuoren 吳作人 is especially evocative of Repin’s image; Wu’s work is reproduced in Guoli zhongyang daxue jiaoyu congkan 國立中央大學教育叢刊 3, no. 1 (1935): 1. For more on the reception of Repin’s image and for examples of trackers in Republican-era art and print culture, see Xiaobing Tang, Origins of the Chinese Avant-Garde (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 177, 181. The tracker is now closely associated with the Gorges, thanks in part to his adoption in the post-Revolution era as a symbol of proletarian fortitude. Like the famous “rice sprout songs” (yangge 秧歌) of Northern China, boatmen’s haozi were repurposed as examples of revolutionary popular culture; Chabrowski, Singing, 23–25.

8. Donald Mennie, The Grandeur of the Gorges: Fifty Photographic Studies, with Descriptive Notes, of China’s Great Waterway, the Yangste Kiang, Including Twelve Hand-Coloured Prints (Shanghai: A. S. Watson, 1926), Preface.

9. H. G. W. Woodhead, The Yangtsze and Its Problems (Shanghai: Mercury Press of Shanghai, 1931), 30. Between 1898 and 1911, only twenty-five steamships reached Chongqing, but numbers began to increase steadily beginning in 1912. By 1922, 693 steamships dropped anchor in Chongqing. While the logistics of moving the Republican capital to Chongqing and provisioning it during the Japanese invasion led to a brief increase in junk traffic, their displacement by steamships was already well underway by the early 1920s. Zhou Yong 周勇, Chongqing tongshi 重慶通史 (Chongqing: Chongqing chubanshe, 2002), 400, cited in Chabrowski, Singing, 76.

10. Woodhead likens Chinese people to animals a number of times in The Yangtsze and Its Problems; see, for example, 84, 101.

11. Woodhead, The Yangtsze and Its Problems, 30.

12. Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 4.

13. Lyman P. Van Slyke, Yangtze: Nature, History, and the River (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1988), 125.

14. Ari Kelman, A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 65.

15. For a variety of historical and economic reasons, traditional shipping methods persisted on the Yangzi (albeit on a small scale) well into the post-Revolution period (Chabrowski, Singing, 2, 20).

16. Chabrowski, Singing, 92.

17. Edward Parker, Up the Yang-tse (Hongkong: China Mail Office, 1891), 19.

18. Van Slyke, Yangtze, 125.

19. “Chinese Lack of Imagination” is a subject heading for a chapter on the gorges in Lawrence John Lumley Dundas’s A Wandering Student in the Far East (London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1908). For more on the history of the supposed failings of the Chinese imagination, see Nicholas R. Clifford, “A Truthful Impression of the Country”: British and American Travel Writing in China 1880–1949 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 56–57, chap. 2–3.

20. Dundas, A Wandering Student, 71.

21. Eric Hayot, The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernity, and Chinese Pain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 141; see also Colleen Lye, America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893–1945 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005). Hayot focuses on American “yellow peril” rhetoric, but similar beliefs are easy to find in British writings.

22. Hayot, The Hypothetical Mandarin, 141.

23. Hayot, The Hypothetical Mandarin, 168. For accounts of the coolie trade that linked Hong Kong with Latin America, see Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015), 21–41, chap. 4, and Evelyn Hu-Dehart, “Chinese Coolie Labor in Cuba and Peru in the Nineteenth Century: Free Labor or Neoslavery?,” Journal of Overseas Chinese Studies 2 (1992): 149–182.

24. Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 1990), 46.

25. Rabinbach, The Human Motor, 2–3.

26. There is an extensive scholarly literature on the application of racial and physiological thought in colonial and national contexts. For examples, see Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), 292–318; Yuehtsen Juliette Chung, Struggle for National Survival: Eugenics in Sino-Japanese Contexts, 1896–1945 (New York: Routledge, 2002); Frank Dikötter, The Discourse of Race in Modern China, 2d ed. (London: Hurst, 2015); Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, rev. ed. (New York: Norton, 1996); and Helen Tilley, Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge, 1870–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). For more on social Darwinism in China, see Andrew Jones, Developmental Fairy Tales: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011); James Pusey, China and Charles Darwin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 1983); and James Pusey, Lu Xun and Evolution (Albany: State University of New York, 1998).

27. Archibald Little, Through the Yang-tse Gorges: or, Trade and Travel in Western China (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1888), 78.

28. Ari Larissa Heinrich’s The Afterlife of Images: Translating the Pathological Body Between China and the West (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008) offers a compelling account of the representational tactics of missionary medicine, including an analysis of the collaboration between the missionary doctor Peter Parker and the Canton export painter Lam Qua. Hayot dedicates a chapter to the same topic in The Hypothetical Mandarin.

29. Hayot, The Hypothetical Mandarin, 145.

30. Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity—China, 1900–1937 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 57.

31. Arthur H. Smith, Chinese Characteristics (Norwalk: EastBridge, 2002), 90.

32. Smith, Chinese Characteristics, 92.

33. Smith, Chinese Characteristics, 94.

34. Smith, Chinese Characteristics, 97. Most of Smith’s “characteristics” were centuries-old racial stereotypes. For more, see Hayot, The Hypothetical Mandarin, especially chap. 1.

35. Smith, Chinese Characteristics, 162–163.

36. Smith, Chinese Characteristics, 168. Smith cites two descriptions of Yangzi River trackers from travel accounts by Sir Alexander Hosie and Little. Isabella Bird provides an even more glowing report of the good-natured tracker: “These trackers may be the roughest class in China—for the work’s ‘inhuman’ and brutalizing—but, nevertheless, they are good-natured in their way, free on the whole from crimes of violence, full of antics, and frolic, clever at taking off foreigners, loving a joke, and with a keen sense of humor”; Isabella Bird, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond (Boston: Beacon, 1985), 215.

37. Smith, Chinese Characteristics, 170.

38. For more on haozi, see Igor Iwo Chabrowski’s Singing on the River, from which I have drawn my examples. Haozi emerged during the Republican period as important examples of laboring-class folk culture. In the early years of the People’s Republic of China, they were taken up as expressions of popular culture that could be recoded with class-conscious revolutionary content. During the Reform Period, they were recategorized as a form of “intangible cultural heritage” (feiwuzhi wenhua yichan 非物質文化遺產); Chabrowski, Singing, 19, 25–26.

39. Little, Through the Yang-tse Gorges, 158. Bird claims that the noise of the river combined with the shouts of trackers pulling her boat over the Xintan affected her hearing for days; The Yangtze Valley, 142; Chabrowski, Singing, 106–107. R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester, N.Y.: Destiny Books, 1994).

40. For more on haozi 號子 as “mnemonic tools created for remembering and navigating in space,” see Chabrowski, Singing, 137.

41. “Laoban dalai laoban ma 老闆打來老闆罵” (The boss beats us, the boss curses us) in Zhongguo geyao jicheng, 20; Chabrowski, Singing, 176.

42. “Yinian siji tanshang pa 一年四季灘上爬” (All year, every season we climb the rapids), Zhongguo geyao jicheng, 19; Chabrowski, Singing, 182.

43. “Women chuangongde shenghuo zhen beican 我們船工的生活真悲慘” (The life of us boatmen is tragic indeed), Zhongguo geyao jicheng, 24; Chabrowski, Singing, 183.

44. Chabrowski, Singing, 180–184.

45. David Strand, Rickshaw Beijing: City People and Politics in the 1920s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Stephen Smith, Like Cattle and Horses: Nationalism and Labor in Shanghai, 1895–1927 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002); Chabrowski, Singing, 264.

46. Rabinbach, The Human Motor, 4.

47. Rabinbach, The Human Motor, 63.

48. Bird, The Yangtze Valley, 138.

49. Bird, The Yangtze Valley, 142–143.

50. Smith’s casual observation obscures the by then already lengthy and controversial history of “dissection-based anatomy” in China. As Ari Larissa Heinrich has argued, over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century, Western medical missionaries “began to construct…still another ‘lack’ in Chinese tradition: the lack of willingness or ‘ability’ to perform autopsy because of what they saw as the cultural superstition that prevented it”; Heinrich, The Afterlife of Images, 118. Whatever lack there might have been was soon filled, not only by the absorption of Western anatomical knowledge but also by the development of an “aesthetics of anatomical realism” that made the figure of dissection central to modern Chinese literary production; Heinrich, The Afterlife of Images, 116. Thanks to Lydia Liu, it is a well-known irony that these realist techniques modeled on metaphors of dissection were deployed by Lu Xun against the very deficient Chinese characteristics cataloged by Smith.

51. Bird, The Yangtze Valley, 144–145.

52. David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 170.

53. For more on Bird’s politics, see Clifford, “A Truthful Impression,” and Susan Schoenbauer Thurin, Victorian Travelers and the Opening of China, 1842–1907 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999), chap. 5.

54. Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire, 175.

55. On her journey, Bird slept in a small cabin, a curtain the “only partition” separating her from the “half naked” trackers. Though she comments on their rough behavior, she decides in the end that they are not so bad, partly because they do not penetrate her space, even though it would have been as easy as pulling back her “cambric curtain”; Bird, The Yangtze Valley, 132.

56. Hayot, The Hypothetical Mandarin, 90.

57. Hayot, The Hypothetical Mandarin, 6.

58. Woodhead, The Yangtsze, 96.

59. I am indebted to Paola Iovene for encouraging me to reconsider the moral ambiguities of Bird’s sympathy in relation to our own sympathetic, artistic, and intellectual labors.

60. Woodhead, The Yangtsze, 147.

61. Woodhead, The Yangtsze, 148.

62. John Hersey, A Single Pebble (New York: Knopf, 1956), 107.

63. Hersey, A Single Pebble, 15.

64. For the history of geology as a modern scientific discipline in China, see Grace Shen, Modern Geology and Nationalism in Republican China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).

65. Hersey, A Single Pebble, 6.

66. Hersey, A Single Pebble, 18.

67. Hersey, A Single Pebble, 15–16.

68. Little, Through the Yang-tse Gorges, 298, 318.

69. Hersey, A Single Pebble, 42–43.

70. This unnamed expert is cited by Eliza Scidmore in China: The Long-lived Empire (New York: Century, 1900), 456. See also Clifford, “A Truthful Impression,” 7.

71. As Julie Greene notes, the degrading effects of prolonged residence in colonial lands was a major concern around the turn of the twentieth century; Julie Greene, The Canal Builders: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal (New York: Penguin Press, 2009), 27.

72. E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (New York: Harcourt, 1924).

73. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness and Other Tales (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

74. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 2008), 38.

75. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, chap. 4.

76. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 95.

77. Hersey, A Single Pebble, 180–181.

78. Hersey, A Single Pebble, 104.

79. Hersey, A Single Pebble, 103–104.

80. Little, Through the Yang-tse Gorges, 318.

81. The “Old” of Pebble’s name is presumably a “translation” of lao 老, which is commonly used as an honorific rather than to indicate age. Although “old” can have a similar flavor in English, it is used more consistently to refer to age. Hersey’s “translation” thus allows him to create a character who is simultaneously relatively young and old, an individual and a timeless type.

82. Little, Gleanings, 42, 178; Bird, The Yangtze Valley, 142.

83. Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire, 22.

84. Hersey, A Single Pebble, 11.

85. Hersey, A Single Pebble, 4.

86. Sun Yat-sen 孫中山, Sanmin zhuyi 三民主義 (Taibei: Zhongyang wenwu gongyingshe, 1985), 272–275.

87. Sun Yat-sen, “Shang Li Hongzhang shu 上李鸿章书,” in Sun Zhongshan quanji 孫中山全集 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1981), vol. 1, 8.

88. Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Interventions in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 7–8.

89. Hersey, A Single Pebble, 107.

1. John Brinckerhoff Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009).

2. John Hersey, A Single Pebble (New York: Knopf, 1956), 82.

3. Hersey, A Single Pebble, 87.

4. Li Daoyuan 酈道元, Shuijing zhu jiaozheng 水經注校證, ed. Chen Qiaoyi 陳橋驛 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2007), 790.

1. Andrew Chan and Jia Zhangke, “Online Exclusive Interview with Jia Zhangke,” Film Comment (March–April 2009), http://www.filmcomment.com/article/jia-zhangke-interview.

2. Rey Chow, “China as Documentary: Some Basic Questions,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 17, no. 1 (2013): 23.

3. The film’s Chinese title echoes Bertolt Brecht’s play The Good Person of Sichuan (Der gute Mensch von Sezuan). For a comparison of the two, see Haiping Yan, “Intermedial Moments: An Embodied Turn in Contemporary Chinese Cinema,” Journal of Chinese Cinema 7, no. 1 (2013), 52.

4. The first part of Dong centers on the creation of Liu Xiaodong’s 劉小東 Hotbed 1 熱床 (2005), a monumental oil painting that features the same local workers (and Han Sanming) Jia taps as amateur actors in Still Life. Liu’s Three Gorges paintings resemble Still Life in their combination of group portraiture and landscape, though Jia’s interest in painting predates these films. As a young man, Jia “studied painting a little” and attended art classes at Shanxi University; Jia Zhangke, Jia xiang 賈想 (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 2009), 48. Though some critics have noted the influence of traditional Chinese landscape painting on Still Life, the default artistic analogy for Jia’s work is usually “poetic.” Jia’s lyricism or “poetic conception” (shiyi 詩意) come up repeatedly in the panel discussion (which included Wang Hui, Li Tuo, and other eminent respondents) that followed a 2007 screening of Still Life; Li Tuo 李陀, Jia Zhangke 賈樟柯, Wang Hui 汪暉, et al., “Sanxia haoren: guli, bianqian yu Jia Zhangke de xianshizhuyi 三峽好人: 故里, 變遷與賈章柯的現實主義,” Dushu 讀書 2 (2007): 3–31. For other poetic readings, see Jiwei Xiao, “The Quest for Memory: Documentary and Fiction in Jia Zhangke’s Films,” senses of cinema 59 (2011), and Jie Li, “Home and Nation Amid the Rubble: Fei Mu’s Spring in a Small Town and Jia Zhangke’s Still Life,” Modern Literature and Culture 21, no. 2 (fall 2009): 86–125. For more on Liu Xiaodong, see Liu Xiaodong and Jeff Kelley, The Three Gorges Project: Paintings by Liu Xiaodong (San Francisco: Asian Art Museum, 2006), and Wu Hung, ed., Displacement: The Three Gorges Dam and Contemporary Chinese Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). Jason McGrath’s essay in this last volume, “The Cinema of Displacement: The Three Gorges in Feature Film and Video” (33–46), is the best overview of cinematic responses to the dam project.

5. Brooke Wilmsen, “Damming China’s Rivers to Expand Its Cities: The Urban Livelihoods of Rural People Displaced by the Three Gorges Dam,” Urban Geography 39, no. 3 (2018): 345–366.

6. Recently, there have been attempts to promote art produced by migrant workers and the rural and urban poor. For his Folk Memory Project (Minjian jiyi jihua 民間記憶計畫), Wu Wenguang 吳文光 recruited filmmakers to produce documentaries based on oral histories of the Great Famine (1959–1961). For more, see Paul Pickowicz, ed., Filming the Everyday: Independent Documentaries in Twenty-First Century China (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), chap. 6, appendix. Qin Xiaoyu’s 秦曉宇 Wode shipian: dangdai gongren shidian 我的詩篇: 當代工人詩典 (Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe, 2015) collects a large number of poems by rural and migrant workers. In 2015, Qin and Wu Feiyue 吳飛躍 also produced a documentary film, Iron Moon (Wode shipian 我的詩篇), which follows a number of these worker-poets, including the Foxconn factory worker Xu Lizhi 許立志, who committed suicide in 2014. For an abbreviated translation of Qin’s collection, see Eleanor Goodman, trans., Iron Moon: An Anthology of Chinese Worker Poetry (Buffalo, N.Y.: White Pine Press, 2016). See also Maghiel van Crevel, “Iron Moon: An Anthology of Chinese Migrant Worker Poetry and Iron Moon (the film)” [review], Modern Chinese Literature and Culture Resource Center, February 2017, https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/vancrevel4/,esp. notes 1 and 3.

7. I am drawing here on Daniel Morgan’s adaptation of Stanley Cavell’s concept of “acknowledging”; Stanley Cavell, “Knowing and Acknowledging,” in Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 238–266. Morgan uses Cavell to reassess André Bazin’s account of cinematic realism, arguing that realism for Bazin can include a variety of aesthetic styles so long as those styles “acknowledge” reality, giving it meaning and “turning it into facts,” which might relate to some specific “understanding of social reality”; Daniel Morgan, “Rethinking Bazin: Ontology and Realist Aesthetics,” Critical Inquiry 32, no. 3 (2006): 472.

8. A number of scholars have singled out portraiture as an important component of Still Life. For an example, see Esther Cheung, “Realisms within Conundrum: The Personal and Authentic Appeal in Jia Zhangke’s Accented Films,” China Perspectives 1 (2010): 18. Portraiture is also central to the structure of 24 City (Ershisi chengji 二十四城記, 2008), the hybrid documentary-narrative film Jia made after Still Life.

9. For more on these “still life” objects, see Jie Li, “Home and Nation.”

10. A. Thirion, Jérémy Segay, and Jia Zhangke, “Festival de Hong-Kong par A. Thirion et Jérémy Segay + Entretien avec Jia Zhang-ke,” Cahiers du Cinéma 623 (May 2007); cited and translated in Dudley Andrew, What Cinema Is! Bazin’s Quest and Its Charge (Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2010), 59.

11. I have explored the question of Jia’s realism in Corey Byrnes, “Specters of Realism and the Painter’s Gaze in Jia Zhangke’s Still Life,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 24, no. 2 (2012): 52–93, which is based on an early version of this chapter. For many scholars, Jia’s realism is beyond question. Esther Cheung, for example, writes that “the subject matter of social concern and Jia’s compassion for the ordinary people place him safely in the realist tradition of Chinese cinema”; Cheung, “Realisms within Conundrum,” 20. Similarly, Jiwei Xiao calls Jia “a die-hard realist”; Xiao, “The Quest for Memory.” For more on problems with approaching Jia’s work in this manner, see Sebastian Veg, “Introduction: Opening Public Spaces,” China Perspectives 1 (2010): 4–10. For general studies of Jia’s work, see Jason McGrath, “The Independent Cinema of Jia Zhangke: From Postsocialist Realism to a Transnational Aesthetic,” in The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, ed. Zhen Zhang (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007), 81–114; Michael Berry, Jia Zhangke’s “Hometown Trilogy”: Xiaowu, Platform, Unknown Pleasures (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); and Pheng Cheah, “World as Picture and Ruination: On Jia Zhangke’s Still Life as World Cinema,” in The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas, ed. Carlos Rojas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 190–208.

12. Robert Mitchell and Jacques Khalip, “Introduction: Release—(Non-)Origination—Concepts,” in Releasing the Image: From Literature to New Media, ed. Jacques Khalip and Robert Mitchell (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2011), 4.

13. Ning Ken 寧肯, “Modern China Is So Crazy It Needs a New Literary Genre,” trans. Thomas Moran, Literary Hub, June 23, 2016, http://lithub.com/modern-china-is-so-crazy-it-needs-a-new-literary-genre/.

14. Chow, “China as Documentary,” 27.

15. Ji 記 and the homophonous character ji 紀 can both refer to records and the act of recording. They can be used interchangeably, though the latter is typically used in the words jilu 紀錄 (document, record) and jilupian 紀錄片 (documentary film).

16. I am drawing here on Chow’s idea of “medial information”; Chow, “China as Documentary,” 12.

17. Judith Shapiro, Mao’s War Against Nature: Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

18. This is only one of a number of scenes in Still Life that revolve around hard currency. Upon his arrival in Fengjie, Han is forced to attend a “magic show” in which a magician “transforms” pieces of paper (“U.S. dollars”) into euros and then renminbi 人民幣. When the men who run the scam ask him to pay a “school fee,” he claims to have no money and defends himself against their attempt to rob him with a well-hidden switchblade. Later, Han’s new friend Mage uses a piece of paper to imitate an image playing on the TV behind him of the Hong Kong film star Chow Yun-fat using a hundred-dollar bill to light a cigarette.

19. Andrew, What Cinema Is!, 75. For a history of this technique, see André Bazin, “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” in What Is Cinema?, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004) vol. 1, 32–35.

20. David Bordwell singles out a technological shift occurring in the 1960s and 1970s—“filmmakers’ growing reliance on long lenses”—as facilitating the even greater extension of depth that allows for “planimetric composition.” Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell, “Observations on Film Art: Shot Consciousness,” David Bordwell’s Website on Cinema, January 16, 2007, http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2007/01/16/shot-consciousness/.

21. For more on ruins, see Wu Hung, A Story of Ruins: Presence and Absence in Chinese Visual Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012); Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2005), 80–81; and “Ruins, Fragmentation, and the Chinese Modern/Postmodern,” in Inside Out: New Chinese Art, ed. Gao Minglu (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Asia Society Galleries 1998), 59–66. For a review of Wu’s A Story of Ruins, see Xavier Ortells-Nicolau, “A Story of Ruins: Presence and Absence in Chinese Art and Visual Culture,” China Quarterly 211 (September 2011): 879–881. Other notable studies of ruins include Li, “Home and Nation”; Xavier Ortells-Nicolau, “Urban Demolition and the Aesthetics of Recent Ruins in Experimental Photography from China” (PhD diss., Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2015); and Sze-lan Deborah Sang, ed., “Special Issue: Ruinscapes in Modern Chinese Literature and Visual Culture,” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 11, no. 2 (2017). See also Gastón Gordillo, Rubble: The Afterlife of Demolition (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014).

22. Buildings in Still Life also function as analogs for the human body, a linkage with a long history in Western architectural theory. For more on the “bodily analogy in architecture,” see Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), 70, and throughout. For a phenomenological approach to the relationship between moving bodies and buildings, see Paul Crowther, Phenomenology of the Visual Arts (Even the Frame) (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009), chap. 10, especially 177–185.

23. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), 25.

24. This scene follows the sequence of modes that Bolter and Grusin have called “immediacy,” “hypermediacy,” and “remediation.” In their terms, immediacy demands a “transparent” medium through which a viewer looks onto a “presentation of the real”; hypermediacy refers to representations that draw attention to their own multimedia construction, at which a viewer is supposed to look; and remediation is the “representation of one medium in another”; Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 21, 41, 45. Whereas various critics emphasize the immediacy of Jia’s work, what we find throughout Still Life is a pervading logic of hypermediacy and remediation.

25. Jia has singled out The Boys from Fengkuei as an especially important early influence on his filmmaking; Jia Zhangke, “Life in Film: Jia Zhangke,” Frieze, April 15, 2007, https://frieze.com/article/life-film-jia-zhangke. For more on Hou Hsiao-hsien’s influence on Jia, see Jason McGrath, Postsocialist Modernity: Chinese Cinema, Literature, and Criticism in the Market Age (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008), 159, and Chan and Jia, “Online Exclusive Interview.”

26. James Tweedie, The Age of New Waves: Art Cinema and the Staging of Globalization (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 169.

27. Jason McGrath, “Cultural Revolution Model Opera Films and the Realist Tradition in Chinese Cinema,” in Opera Q 26, no. 2–3 (2010): 351.

28. Stephanie Donald, Public Secrets, Public Spaces: Cinema and Civility in China (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 62.

29. “The World Is Truly Changeable, like a Sea Become a Mulberry Field” is the final line of Mao’s 1949 poem commemorating the communist capture of Nanjing, “The People’s Liberation Army Occupies Nanjing 人民解放軍佔領南京.” For the Chinese text as well as a translation, see Mao Zedong, The Poems of Mao Zedong, trans. Willis Barnstone (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 74–75.

30. Ban Wang, The Sublime Figure of History: Aesthetics and Politics in Twentieth-Century China (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), 8.

31. Melissa Chiu and Zheng Shengtian, eds. Art and China’s Revolution (New York: Asia Society, 2008), 32, 34.

32. Landslides caused by the increased pressure of the reservoir have had a serious impact on water quality and the health of riverbank ecosystems and have also led to the relocation of large numbers of people. See Michael Wines, “Landslide Risk at Reservoir Cited in China,” New York Times, April 18, 2012, and Liu Qin, “Landslide Destroys Dam in the Three Gorges Region,” China Dialogue, September 22, 2014, www.chinadialogue.net/article/show/single/en/7333-Landslide-destroys-dam-in-Three-Gorges-region.

33. For more on the role of naked and nearly naked bodies in Still Life and Jia’s documentary film, Dong, see Corey Byrnes, “Men at Work: Independent Documentary and Male Bodies,” forthcoming.

34. The magical moments of Still Life, and this scene in particular, have attracted a great deal of scholarly attention. The monument as rocket even appears on the cover of Dudley Andrew’s What Cinema Is! For interpretations of Jia’s surrealism, see Andrew, What Cinema Is!, 59–61; McGrath, “The Cinema of Displacement,” 42–43; and Tweedie, The Age of New Waves, 298–299. Jie Li cites Jia’s own explanation of the surreal quality of Fengjie, which he links not only to the upheaval caused by the dam project but also to the older myths of Mt. Wu as a scene of fabulous transformation; Li, “Home and Nation,” 105.

35. McGrath, “The Cinema of Displacement,” 46n7. Jia might be commenting on the failed promises made to those displaced by the dam or on the money that the government was pouring into China’s manned space program around the time the film was being made. China’s primary spacecraft is known as the Shenzhou 神州 (Divine Land), another poetic name for China.

36. Karl Marx, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in The Portable Karl Marx, ed. Eugene K. Kamenka (New York: Penguin, 1983), 207.

37. Wu Hung argues that soon after Political Pop appeared on the scene, it “exhausted the source of its pictorial vocabulary,” thereby helping “to conclude post–Cultural Revolution Art and to usher in an important change in the Chinese art world beginning around the mid-nineties”; Wu, Transience, 23. While it is true that “many artists [have] finally bid farewell to the Cultural Revolution,” one wonders if the ghosts of such historical trauma can be so easily banished. The work of Jia and other artists suggests otherwise.

38. Though we do not hear the lyrics to Han Sanming’s ringtone, “May the Good Live Forever in Peace” focuses on the passage of the time, the distance of loved ones, and the sensation of continued closeness.

39. Edward L. Davis, ed., Encyclopedia of Contemporary Chinese Culture (New York: Routledge, 2005), 138.

40. It is Mage’s bravado that gets him killed. When Han calls his friend later in the film, he hears Yip’s voice emanating from the pile of rubble under which Mage’s body has been buried. For readings of this scene, see Yan, “Intermedial Moments,” 54–56, and Cheah, “World as Picture,” 198–203. Yan also identifies a third song that is tied to Shen Hong’s character; Yan, “Intermedial Moments,” 55.

41. Sebastian Veg, “Building a Public Consciousness: A Conversation with Jia Zhangke,” in China Perspectives 1 (2010): 59; McGrath, “The Independent Cinema of Jia Zhangke,” 97, 112n25.

42. In Still Life, popular songs are not only traces of their historical moments but also expressions of the different “structures of feeling” that define the main characters. Yan, “Intermedial Moments,” 54–55.

43. Li, “Home and Nation,” 102, 101. Li reads each line in Li Bai’s poem as having “subtle cinematic correspondences in Still Life”; Li, “Home and Nation,” 101. In addition to the structural parallels that she finds between the poem and the film, she also positions Li Bai’s unmediated poetic experience against the “ideological landscape” presented by the televisual propaganda; Li, “Home and Nation,” 102.

44. Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016), 21.

1. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), 255.

2. Wu Hung and Yun-fei Ji, “A Conversation Between Yun-fei Ji and Wu Hung,” in Displacement: The Three Gorges Dam and Contemporary Chinese Art, ed. Wu Hung (Chicago: Smart Museum of Art, 2008), 103.

3. For representative examples of trauma-studies scholarship, see Cathy Caruth, Listening to Trauma: Conversations with Leaders in the Theory and Treatment of Catastrophic Experience (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014); Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); and Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992); Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); and Michael S. Roth, Memory, Trauma, and History: Essays on Living with the Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).

4. Paul K. Saint-Amour, Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 1.

5. Scholars in trauma studies have described (or promoted) various types of empathy, including Dominick LaCapra’s concept of “empathetic unsettlement,” Kaja Silverman’s “heteropathic identification,” and Jill Bennett’s “empathic vision.” LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma; Kaja Silverman, Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge, 1996); Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005).

6. Tan Lin, “Yun-fei Ji and the Unchanging Structures of History,” in Yun-fei Ji: The Empty City, ed. Shannon Fitzgerald (St. Louis: Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis, 2004), 25.

7. Trauma has become a familiar topic in Chinese studies. See Michael Berry, A History of Pain: Trauma in Modern Chinese Literature and Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); Xiaobing Tang, Chinese Modern: The Heroic and the Quotidian (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000), especially chap. 1; Ban Wang, Illuminations from the Past: Trauma, Memory, and History in Modern China (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004); and David Der-wei Wang, The Monster That Is History: History, Violence, and Fictional Writing in Twentieth-Century China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

8. This phrase is used both by Richard McNally, Remembering Trauma (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2003), 9, and by Leys, Trauma, 2.

9. Caruth, Trauma, 5; Roth, Memory, Trauma, and History, 82; Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 7; LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, xi. Beginning in 1980, the psychiatric field has also sought to produce an acceptable clinical definition of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). McNally, Remembering Trauma, 8–13; Caruth, Trauma, 3–4.

10. For more on Freud’s concept (and Caruth’s adaptation) of Nachträglichkeit, see Leys, Trauma, 20–21, 270–271.

11. Leys, Trauma, 20.

12. Caruth, Trauma, 8.

13. As Gregory Volk notes, wind has its own set of cultural connotations in China. It is “a metaphor for the Emperor and all his whims and decisions, as well as being a metaphor for revolutionary force. When one ‘listens to the wind,’ one attempts to divine where policy might be headed and what its effects might be”; Gregory Volk, “The Empty City,” in Yun-fei Ji: The Empty City, ed. Shannon Fitzgerald (St. Louis: Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis, 2004), 57.

14. Roth, Memory, Trauma, and History, chap. 1–3; Leys, Trauma, chap. 2–3.

15. The retrospective pull of trauma has long been offered up as a metaphor for historiography: to try to make sense of history is to be drawn ineluctably into narratives of both personal and collective trauma. Because it “appears to demand inclusion in any narrative of the development of the present yet makes any narrative seem painfully inadequate,” trauma inevitably returns to demand its right to a new narrative that will inevitably fail, thus requiring another attempt, and so on, ad infinitum. Roth, Memory, Trauma, and History, 82.

16. David L. Eng and David Kazanjian, Loss: The Politics of Mourning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 4.

17. Eng and Kazanjian, Loss, 4.

18. Benjamin, “Theses,” 255.

19. Eng and Kazanjian explain this artistic tendency toward indeterminacy by arguing that the ego itself is the product of “the residues of its accumulated losses,” that it emerges from melancholy and the preservation of “abandoned object-cathexes”; Eng and Kazanjian, Loss, 4). Individual melancholic objects never exist in isolation because the ego is actually composed of the undifferentiated and accumulated traces of such objects. Hence, “the ability of the melancholic object to express multiple losses at once speaks to its flexibility as a signifier, endowing it with not only a multifaceted but also a certain palimpsest-like quality”; Eng and Kazanjian, Loss, 53.

20. Benjamin, “Theses,” 257.

21. Tan Lin’s analysis of Ji’s style is among the most sophisticated available, though he tends to emphasize its parodic rather than constructive qualities; Tan Lin, “Yun-fei Ji,” 26–29.

22. The most famous expression of this allegorical mode is an essay attributed to the Northern Song painter Guo Xi 郭熙 (ca. 1020–1090) and his son Guo Si 郭思 (active ca. 1070–after 1123), translated by Susan Bush and Hsiao-yen Shih in Early Chinese Texts on Painting, 2d ed. (Aberdeen, UK: Hong Kong University Press, 2012), 150–154. For more on this mode, see Martin Powers, “When Is a Landscape Like a Body?” in Landscape, Culture, and Power in Chinese Society, ed. Wen-hsin Yeh (Berkeley, Calif.: Institute of East Asian Studies, 1998), 1–22.

23. Melissa Chiu and Yun-fei Ji, “Ghosts, Three Gorges, and Ink: An Interview with Yun-fei Ji,” in Yun-fei Ji: The Empty City, ed. Shannon Fitzgerald (St. Louis: Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis, 2004), 81.

24. Chiu and Yun-fei Ji, “Ghosts,” 80. The catalog to Ji’s exhibition at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing contains selections from Ji’s “field notes,” as well as photographs that he took as preparatory research; Paula Tsai, ed., Yun-fei Ji: Water Work (Beijing: UCCA Books, 2012), 91–92.

25. Ji’s debt to Republican-era artists, including Xu Beihong 徐悲鴻 (1859–1953) and Jiang Zhaohe 蔣兆和 (1904–1986), has received relatively little notice. As Stephen J. Goldberg notes, Ji’s Three Gorges Dam Migration scroll is especially reminiscent of Jiang’s long (78.5 x 1063 inches) handscroll Refugees 流民圖 (1943), which depicts the victims of the Japanese invasion; Stephen J. Goldberg, “The Fate of Place and Memory in the Art of Yun-fei Ji,” in Yun-fei Ji: The Intimate Universe, ed. Tracy Adler (New York: Prestel, 2016), 79.

26. Valérie Malenfer Ortiz, Dreaming the Southern Song Landscape: The Power of Illusion in Chinese Painting (Boston: Brill, 1999).

27. Below the 143 Meter Watermark is almost exactly double the height of one of the most famous Song landscapes, Fan Kuan’s 范寬 (active ca. 1023–1031) Travelers Amid Streams and Mountains (Xishan xinglü 谿山行旅), in the collection of the National Palace Museum, Taibei.

28. Francine Prose, “Water Colored: Demons and Detritus in Yun-fei Ji’s Restive Landscape,” in Ji Yun-fei: Mistaking Each Other for Ghosts, ed. Jessica Lin Cox, Christopher Lawson, and Leo Xu (New York: James Cohen Gallery, 2010), 10.

29. John Hay, “Values and History in Chinese Painting, II: The Hierarchic Evolution of Structure,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 7–8 (spring–autumn 1984), 112.

30. Wu, Displacement, 22.

31. Wu and Ji, “A Conversation,” 103.

32. Three Gorges Dam Migration Scroll is the English title provided by the Museum of Modern Art Library, which commissioned this image. A literal translation of the Chinese title, Sanxia kuqu yimin tu 三峽庫區移民圖, is Three Gorges Reservoir Zone Migrants Scroll.

33. Mao Zedong, “Strategic Problems in the Anti-Japanese Guerrilla War,” Collected Works, vol. 2 (Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 1967).

34. For more on water and the uncanny, see Jiayan Mi, “Framing Ambient Unheimlich: Ecoggedon, Ecological Unconscious, and Water Pathology in New Chinese Cinema,” in Chinese Ecocinema, ed. Sheldon Lu and Jiayan Mi (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009), 21.

35. Both Wu Hung and Ronald Egan trace the origins of liumin tu 流民圖 to the story of Zheng Xia 鄭俠 (1041–1119), an official who served during the implementation of Wang Anshi’s 王安石 (1021–1086) controversial New Policies. In 1074, Zheng submitted a memorial that detailed negative effects of the policies and a painting that depicted the devastated peasantry. He was eventually arrested and exiled for his attack on Wang, but his act of pictorial remonstrance is seen as launching the genre of liumin tu 流民圖. Wu, Displacements, 20; Ronald Egan, Word, Image, and Deed in the Life of Su Shi (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 47–48.

36. Rey Chow, “China as Documentary: Some Basic Questions,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 17, no. 1 (2013): 26.

37. Benjamin, “Theses,” 255.

38. McNally, Remembering Trauma, 9; Caruth, Trauma, 5.

39. Wu and Ji, “A Conversation,” 103–104.

40. Many scholars have written specifically about the chai(-na) phenomenon (and demolition in general). See especially Yomi Braester, “Tracing the City’s Scars: Demolition and the Limits of the Documentary Impulse in the New Urban Cinema,” in The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century, ed. Zhen Zhang (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007), 161–180; Sheldon H. Lu, Chinese Modernity and Global Biopolitics: Studies in Literature and Visual Culture (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007); Sheldon H. Lu, “Tear Down the City: Reconstructing Urban Space in Contemporary Chinese Popular Cinema and Avant-Garde Art,” in The Urban Generation, 137–160; and Wu Hung, A Story of Ruins: Presence and Absence in Chinese Visual Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012).

41. Chai works its magic so effectively because, on its own, the character lacks tense. Chinese is an uninflected language, and without additional temporal markers, there is no way to tell whether chai should be read in the past tense, as “demolished” or “has been demolished”; in the future tense, as “will be demolished” or “to be demolished”; or in the imperative, as “demolish!” For an alternative approach to chai, see Mi, “Framing Ambient Unheimlich,” 24–25.

42. See Chiu and Ji, “Ghosts, Three Gorges, and Ink,” 89.

43. A Monk’s Retreat (2002), The Move in Badong (2002), The Wait (2009), The Guest People (2009), and Autumn Colors (2003).

44. Last Days Before the Flood (2006) and Four People Leaving Badong (2009).

45. Isabella Bird, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), 145.

46. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 21. The Body in Pain has been subjected to numerous critiques. Geoffrey Harpham, for example, has argued that Scarry’s tendency to hyperbole leads her to draw dubious conclusions. He understands Scarry as arguing that “regardless of the intentions of makers and consumers, material artifacts—including presumably, all the instruments at the torturer’s disposal and all the machines of war—have but one ‘absolute intention,’ to relieve sentient being of its pain”; Geoffrey Galt Harpham, “Elaine Scarry and the Dream of Pain,” Salmagundi, no. 130–131 (spring–summer 2001): 228. For an even stronger critique, see Peter Singer, “Unspeakable Acts,” New York Review of Books 33 (February 27, 1986): 27–30. While I acknowledge the idiosyncratic nature of Scarry’s argumentation, the almost speculative quality of her materialism offers valuable insights for analyzing how objects function in Yun-fei Ji’s artistic practice.

47. Scarry, The Body in Pain, 244.

48. Scarry, The Body in Pain, 262.

49. These men evoke not only early European anatomical renderings of the human form, but also their repetition in Luo Ping’s Ghost Amusements, a painting that includes figures copied directly from a 1630 Chinese copy (based on a 1605 German copy) of the De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543), with illustrations by Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564). Jonathan D. Spence, “Specters of a Chinese Master,” New York Review of Books 56 (December 3, 2009): 14. For more on Luo Ping, see Kim Karlsson, Alfreda Murck, and Michele Matteini, eds., Eccentric Visions: The Worlds of Luo Ping (Zürich: Museum Reitberg Zürich, 2009).